February 16, 2015

I am sitting in my living room as I type this. I was crocheting a moment ago, and before that I was texting my sister. There is not a whole lot else I can do, except maybe go upstairs and clean Julia’s room, but why should I get all the fun? She should get to do some of it herself.

I digress.

While I sit here, with a sinus/stress/tension/not-enough-sleep headache pounding away in various parts of my skull, there is noise. Lots of noise. Big electrical cutting tool noises, and cracking and falling noises, with the occasional human voice. The voices are from the guys in my kitchen and my basement. They are the ones operating the big electrical cutting tools and dealing with the cracking and falling of debris – sheetrock – from the kitchen ceiling. And the plaster of the basement ceiling.

In my last post I wrote about the pipe that burst. Since that post, there have been a bunch of other delightful chapters related to that first story, but I don’t even feel like writing about any of it because I’m just tired of all of this. I don’t want to relive it. So I’ll just write about what’s happening at this moment.

The crew arrived around 8 this morning to do their demolition thing. Bill and I had moved everything out of the kitchen except for stuff in the lower cupboards – hopefully the crew won’t need to get behind the walls there. But I am not holding my breath.

We had also moved all the stuff out of the corner of the basement Most Likely To Have Been Affected By the Waterfall. Of course, that happened to be primarily “my” corner of the basement – my work area, where all my fabric and yarn and all the other creative stuff is. And you just don’t realize how much crap you have until you have to move it somewhere else.

Anyway, those are the areas the guys are working on. They’ve put protection down on the floors, and they’ve draped plastic over the doorways so most of the dust stays where they are and not where we are. They are all very nice and polite guys. It’s comforting to have a nice crew.

Alex is asleep. Julia is at a friend’s house. Bill is upstairs trying to take a nap because he didn’t sleep well at all last night and he has to teach later.

I am typing, and when I finish for today I’ll go back to crocheting.

Let’s talk about that. It’s more fun.

I’d started crocheting an afghan a couple of weeks ago, just because why not. I didn’t have any specific person in mind, I just wanted a big, mindless project. Something to work on while listening to reruns of NCIS and Criminal Minds. Because crocheting and murder are such a natural pairing.

Did I show you the other stuff I’ve been crocheting? Oh, yeah, I did. Well, some of them. I also crocheted a couple other little bowl/basket things. I’ll have to post some pictures at some point. They’re fun to make. Little yarn sculptures. But I find I need to pay attention (really?) while I’m making them, otherwise they get lopsided or ruffled or just wrong looking. I wanted a project that I could just do mindlessly when I needed mindlessness.

So I started an afghan. I had some teal yarn, a few different shades, so I used one of those skeins to start. I chained 201 and started single crocheting back and forth and back and forth.

It’s meditative. Peaceful.

And once I got about five or six rows done, it began to look like Something. So besides meditative and peaceful, it had become rewarding as well.

Julia saw me working on it as some point and immediately asked if it was for her. She asks that about everything I make, just about. I said no. I told her I didn’t have any specific plans for it. Yet.

She wore me down, of course. “Can I have it?” I finally said yes, so whenever I complete it, the afghan will be hers. She wants to change the colors of her room to teal and white (instead of the pink and purple she’s had for a bunch of years), so it works out.

And then I started thinking I really needed to make something for Alex. I’ve crocheted a couple of elephants, a basket, a hat and matching scarf and possibly other things for Julia since I started crocheting a year and a half ago or whenever that was. So I asked Alex what he would like me to make for him, because you know, when you have more than one child, you need to be fair. Not exactly the same, but fair. He no longer wants a crocheted dinosaur or any other little animal. He doesn’t like the look of crocheted hats, and he doesn’t wear scarves. He doesn’t seem to mind that I haven’t crocheted him anything, but still, I don’t want to discover, years from now, that he’s been harboring a secret pain and resentment because Julia’s gotten more crocheted things from me than he has.

So I’m making him an afghan too.

I had three skeins of a bulky green yarn that I’d bought last year just because I was buying yarn because I was Learning To Crochet! and I liked it – medium-dark green with flecks of red, mustard and blue – and maybe I’d make something with it so I should buy 3 skeins!

I still had that yarn, so I showed Alex and he nodded his approval (or apathy, sometimes it’s hard to tell) and I started with that. It’s bulky, like I said, so it works up faster than the one I’m doing for Julia. So I chained 176 and half double crocheted a bunch of rows and then realized the rows were getting shorter so I yanked it all apart and started again, this time Paying Attention at the turns so I wouldn’t shorten anything.

Alex’s afghan is nice to work on because the yarn is especially soft, and because as long as I don’t screw up again, it will go quicker. Of course, three skeins of yarn isn’t enough, so I HAD to go out and get more. I picked up more of the same yarn, plus a mustard color and red to pick up some of the flecks in the green. I’m also crocheting into the back of the V in order to give the afghan a more pronounced stripe effect. I’ll take pictures when there’s more of it to show you.

So today I’ll work on Alex’s afghan. I feel like I want to finish his first, since Julia already has other stuff.

The loud electric cutting tool noises have temporarily ceased. I haven’t looked, but Bill said they’re pretty close to being done. I’d imagined an entire day of noise. But maybe they’re just clearing debris before they start hacking away again. I don’t know. I am in my red chair near the fireplace, typing away and hoping that by distracting myself the tension in my head will subside. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I think it’s working.

Anyway, after all the ceiling stuff is pulled down, the guys will test for moisture in the walls, and if a wall needs to come down (oh please no), they’ll remove the cupboards and have at it. Tomorrow the adjustor will come out to look at all the damage and destruction and evaluate it all and do her adjusting. We will decide what we’d like to have done and what we’d prefer to do ourselves. And we will go from there.

It’s been frustrating and miserable at times. I don’t think all the snow – storms every week – and the cold weather are helping. The kitchen has always been colder than other parts of the house, but since the burst pipe and we tore down a big wet section of the ceiling, it’s been even colder. Breezy, even. And then our second floor heat is now working properly, but it feels too hot, probably because we’re not used to being so warm up there. It’s like we have a whole bunch of different climates throughout the house. Maybe my headache is from jet lag.

I think they’re vacuuming up debris right now, and I think their boss is coming over to check things out, so I’ll close for now and go back to my crocheting.

January 31, 2015

Once upon a time two days ago I was looking forward to my two days off this week.

Once upon a time two days ago I was looking forward to tackling some big projects and some small projects, some projects around the house, and some projects just for my own personal creative satisfaction.

Once upon a time two days ago I was selfishly looking forward to some very quiet me time while Bill and the kids would be at work/school on one day and gone skiing on the next day.

Once upon a time yesterday I got everyone fed and lunches packed and out the door to work/school, and was planning to make breakfast for myself (finally) and do some laundry and the dishes and some decluttering and some crocheting or something else creative.

Once upon a time yesterday when I was booting Julia out the door kissing and hugging Julia and wishing her a good day at school, I noticed a few beads of water hanging from the frame above our kitchen door. One dripped onto Julia’s head. I wondered if snow had somehow leaked in and melted from the warmth in the kitchen…no…that didn’t make any sense. Maybe…maybe I should look online and see what other people thought. So I did. And the main suggestion I saw had to do with old flashing outside and above the doorframe, that allowed melting snow (it was warm yesterday, mid-thirties) to drip in and bead up along the underside of the door frame and drip on the heads of school-going children.

Okay, not a huge deal. Just get some more flashing and replace the old stuff.

Breakfast was still doable.

So once upon a time yesterday I thought I’d throw some laundry in first, then make some french toast for myself, and watch whatever crime drama show was on tv while I ate and then get going on a project.

Once upon a time I lived in a fairytale world.

I got downstairs and heard the waterfall and my stomach clenched into a knot as I had PTSD flashbacks to a whole bunch of years ago – Alex was a baby, Julia was a future issue – when a pipe in our main floor bathroom burst while Bill and I were at work and I just happened to come home for lunch that day and just happened to hear what sounded like Niagara Falls inside my house. The water had poured down through the ceiling to flood the floor of our finished basement with about 4-6” of water. After the cleanup came the fun (said with heavy sarcasm) of having to get everything fixed/replaced.

At least the floor wasn’t flooded. In fact, in a little unemotional corner of my mind I knew the water couldn’t have been pouring for very long. Julia had been downstairs hunting for something to wear not too much before she left the house. If water was pouring from the ceiling, she would have mentioned it. Loudly.

Anyway, I rounded the corner and sure enough, water poured through the light and also through the frame around the little washer/dryer nook. I put trash cans and buckets under the drips, shut off water, and called Bill at work.

I also pulled the frame around the light fixture out of the ceiling so the water could drain better. And I tried figuring out where the water was coming from. I couldn’t find any burst pipes anywhere. Bill and I both suspected the roof. Ugh.

So Bill got home and helped shut the water off better than I’d been able to – the pipes and spigots are old and gunked up apparently, and hard to turn. He used a wrench at one point.

And the water slowed noticeably once the water was off. When Bill got home he drilled some holes in the basement ceiling to see how much water was pooled above it and to see how far the pooling extended. I got more cans and buckets to catch the new rain.

Finally, it stopped.

We took another look around the door frame and tried to figure out where the roof was leaking. We both had a feeling it was somewhere along the seam where the lower roof joined the main part of the house. Annoying, but probably fixable, at least until we can afford to redo the whole roof.

Bill called his nephew, Joe, who has a ton of practical knowledge about a all sorts of construction-related topics, and when he came back into the kitchen and was talking and I was looking up (because he’s considerably taller than I am, in case you don’t already know that), I noticed, above his head, along the ceiling, more beads of water.

I just pointed.

Bill got his drill and made some more holes.

I got an assortment of pots out to catch the newest indoor rain.

So the newest thought was that it was something to do with the shower in the second floor bathroom. The faucet has dripped for some time, and the pipes for it are hidden behind the wall of the little bathroom closet.

By the way, that seems to have been a favorite trick of the people who prepared this house for sale before we naively came in and bought it. It’s a lovely house, and a great neighorhood, and we’ve got a nice back yard, and we’ve done all sorts of wonderful things here. But back then we had never bought a house before, had never been through the joy of troubleshooting problems before, never been through the unjoy of discovering all the problem issues covered up by paint and sheetrock and pretty ceilings and less than scrupulous people.

ANYWAY. We shut off the water (again) and watched the water slow to a trickle. Then we turned the water back on, just to see what might happen.

Guess what. More water.

Joe suggested pouring a whole bunch (ten gallons or so) of water down the shower drain, just to see if the water was a drain issue or a leaky pipe issue.

Oh, and then water started beading up on the ceiling near the kitchen door, kind of almost above the fridge. ACROSS THE ROOM from the other beading that had occurred above the stove.

More drilling. Lots and lots more drilling, just because hey, why not find out how much water there is and how far it’s travelled.

When I was in the second grade, we performed a musical version of the story of Bambi. Mainly it consisted of a bunch of songs separated by some narration and some cardboard cutouts of deer and forest creatures interacting as much as two-dimensional creatures can when toted around by shy seven-year-olds.

One of the songs was “April Shower” or something like that, and some of it went like this:

“Drip, drip, drop, little April Shower/beating a tune everywhere that you fall/

Those lines kept dripping through my mind as our kitchen was transformed into an ugly rainforest.

I also remembered this (my memory frightens me at times) from a record of Captain Kangaroo songs:

Though April showers May come your way, They bring the flowers That bloom in May; And if it's raining, Have no regrets; Because, it isn't raining rain, you know, It's raining violets. And when you see clouds Upon the hill, You soon will see crowds Of daffodils; So keep on looking for the bluebird, And listening for his song, Whenever April showers come along.

And I just discovered that that’s actually a song by Al Jolson. Didn’t know that – I only have the voice of Bob Keeshan singing it in my head.

Anyway, all sorts of rain-themed songs drifted through my head as I determinedly remained positive about the whole soaking experience. I can be very determined.

Besides, there were things about the kitchen we weren’t too thrilled about. Like the stains that came through the ceiling over time – stains the Other People had simply covered up with a couple coats of paint, without doing anything to really block those stains first.

And the basement ceiling is all pretty swirls but totally impractical, especially if you have water-pouring-through-it issues like we do.

So this was ultimately A Good Thing! Right???

Right!

So Bill started ripping down the kitchen ceiling.

A lot of the ceiling.

I took pictures when I wasn’t helping clear up the soggy sheetrock and insulation.

And we eventually figured out several things:

A. The water was not due to a shower drain issue.

B. The water rained more when we turned the water ON at the source.

C. The main dripping seemed to occur at the last spot we discovered – almost above the fridge.

Joe came over after work and we shared with him all our exciting clues and showed him how we could make it rain! in the kitchen!

And he looked at all of this and thought about our house and how the rooms are and why the heck would anything leak THERE – only Alex’s bedroom is up there and there’s no plumbing in Alex’s room and…

No, no plumbing, but there were heating pipes that ran along the sides of the house, and where Alex’s and Julia’s room joined, there was also a little crawlspace under the eaves. Joe and Bill and I cleared a path through all of Julia’s can’t-throw-away-for-sentimental-reasons piles of…STUFF…to get to the door of that little crawlspace, and Joe took a look inside and our search was ended.

A cracked pipe from the baseboard heating element. It wasn’t actually in a bedroom, so it wasn’t warm unless there was warm/hot water coursing through it. AND, we’ve had some geriatric furnace issues (which Joe helped out with a couple of weeks ago) that have meant that the heat hasn’t been reaching the second floor, and so the pipe was cold and lonely and cracked under the strain.

Well, okay, cracked from the freezing and expanding cold water stuck inside.

Anyway, it was fixable! That night! Just a trip to get some copper pipe, a pipe cutter, soldering stuff, other stuff…and we would be free of rain! Yay!

Best of all, it shouldn’t take long!

And while he was at it, Joe offered to install a shutoff valve for our water so we wouldn’t have to break our hands on stubborn old spigots. Yay!

And five hours later, ‘round midnight, it was mostly done. The shutoff valve worked, and, second time’s the charm, the pipe in the crawlspace had been replaced with an uncracked piece of copper.

We could run the water!

We could turn the heat back on!

We could go to bed!

While Bill and Joe were working on all the pipe issues, and the heat was off, I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen. Most of it, anyway. That helped, psychologically, too.

So here’s where we are as of 3 pm on Saturday.

Saturday, my second day of peace and quiet.

And so now we have a few new projects that were not on our lists.

Finish pulling down the kitchen ceiling.

Replace the ceiling.

Paint the ceiling.

Maybe tile behind the stove.

New vent/fan above the stove, because it’s overdue anyway and so why not?

Probably peel off the wallpaper that was hidden UNDER the paint in the kitchen.

Paint the walls.

Cut out a section of the basement ceiling to see how much damage there is and create a new section of ceiling that is removable so if/when we get another waterfall in the house we won’t have to DESTROY the ceiling to drain it.

And it’s not like we didn’t have any house-related projects planned…both kids are ready for new paint in their bedrooms. When we originally created their bedrooms (Joe was instrumental in all of that, too) and painted them, the kids were little and so the décor was kid-themed. Rainforest for Alex, stencilled butterflies for Julia). But now that they are older, they want less cuteness. And that’s fair.

We also planned to paint the second floor bathroom. The paint has peeled and Bill has sanded it down, so now it’s a kind of collage of old and newer paint. We would like just one color now.

The walls on the main floor need a breath of fresh color, too. And we had wanted to redo the hardwood floors….

And so that’s the update. The unexpected plans.

To be honest I kind of like the kitchen right now. We moved everything that was on walls or counters or any other exposed surfaces into the dining room and the living room, so the kitchen now looks quite bright and airy and uncluttered. And with the great big holes in the ceiling, it’s become even more spacious.

That’s tee shirt yarn in the above picture. I took tons of old tee shirts, ours and some donated by friends and family, cut them into strips, connected the strips, and rolled them into balls and balls of color. Finishing all that prepping was a huge project in itself, but now the fun part has begun – I can make things with all this “free” yarn.

Where to start?

A few weeks ago I brought a couple of big wagonloads (kids’ wagon, not the horse-drawn kind) of seasoned wood into the house. We run our fireplace as our primary heat source on days when we will have someone (adult) at the house the entire day to maintain the fire. I was off of work that day, so I brought in more than enough wood to keep the house cozy, and I brought it in through the front door instead of through the kitchen because it was a shorter (and less messy) trip to the fireplace that way. In order to avoid tracking dirt and moisture into the house, I put a towel down on the floor, and that reminded me that we probably really should have a welcome mat of come kind at the front of the house so people coming in could wipe their muddy boots.

So that became my first tee shirt yarn project, after the Rolling of The Balls.

I chose fire colors – reds, oranges, yellows, a bit of blue, pale gray (ashes), and dark brown (wood). I decided to try an oval-shaped rug, rather than the round, or roundish, ones I’ve made so far.

I began with red…

I like working on large projects. They go quickly, and so there’s that instant gratification thing working for me. Plus, big projects are…BIG!

Unfortunately, I was impatient at the turns, and I chose (stupidly) to ignore the beginnings of ruffles that were starting to form. And so eventually the ruffles grew so big they could not be ignored, and so I had to pull out a ton of stitches and almost start over completely.

Twice.

Or maybe it was three times. I don’t remember. I may have blocked it out.

Anyway, I finished most of it, laid it out on the floor and finally accepted reality. I’d rushed and not paid attention at the rounded ends, and while ruffles are acceptable on baby girls and pillows, they don’t work so well on rugs.

So, resignedly meeting reality’s eyes, I pulled it all apart. The whole thing. The WHOLE thing.

I had four large balls of fire-color tee shirt yarn.

And I started over. Slowly and attentively this time.

At first I had this kind of multi-sectioned idea but in the interest of time and sanity, I opted for a simple – but correctly executed – oval.

I’m happy with the result. A bit larger might have been nice, but I’d run out of fire colors.

Why the fire colors? Warmth and welcome to people entering the house…and because I got the idea on a day when I was going to have a fire going…and because the fireplace is close by.

You can see it curling up a bit at the edge here and there, but over time that will stay flattened. You can NOT see ruffles. :)

~~~

I like crocheting rugs. I also like baskets.

A few weeks ago I made this little basket – no pattern, just playing around. It’s about six inches or so in diameter at the bottom, all single crochet until near the top, where I alternated double crochet and chain stitches to create the pattern around the top. I finished off with one more round of single crochet. It sits near the sink in our upstairs bathroom and is filled with hair things – rubber bands, scrunchies, barrettes.

More recently – earlier this week, actually – I decided to try crocheting with multiple strands of yarn at once. I chose two shades of teal and some medium gray, a large hook, and I started single crocheting a circle. Then when the diameter was wide enough (maybe 8”?) I started forming the sides. I did a few rows of single crochet, then experimented with a sort of wavy pattern of two single crochet, two half double crochet, two double crochet, two half double, two single, over and over for several rows. You don’t really see the waviness as much as I’d hoped, but it does add some interest and dimension, I think. And instead of weaving the ends in when I finished, I braided them instead.

Here’s the result:

Julia loved the colors, so I’d promised her the basket.

Basket. I did say basket, right?

But, you know, mothers and daughters often see things differently.

~~~

And then, after that very quick project, I decided to go small.

Right before Christmas (or maybe it was the morning of), my sister told me she still didn’t know what to give me besides canned stuff she and my brother-in-law had made with their garden bounty. So I asked her for yarn scraps! I think I will always ask for yarn scraps.

Some of the yarn was hers, and some had been part of our grandmother’s stash. Our grandmother was a multi-talented woman who played piano, drew in charcoals and pencil, painted in oils, watercolor and acrylics, and could crochet and knit and sew and quilt. So much talent packed into a small and quiet woman!

Anyway, one skein of yarn was this strange looking stuff that resembled string wrapped in colored thread. It’s called “Aunt Lydia’s Beadies Crochet Thread” and apparently Aunt Lydia isn’t making it any more because I couldn’t find something good to link to.

Anyway, I thought it would be perfect to make something small.

Like…a Very Small Basket!

Here’s my awkwardly-positioned left hand holding the Very Small Basket-in-progress. The hand is there for size comparison only. Or to make me wince. Take your pick.

Anyway, I crochet a tiny little circle for the bottom and then started up the sides, all single crochet, until it was the size I wanted. I should tell you I crocheted into the back loop of the stitches, not the whole loop. It gives a different look that I have now decided I like a lot for Very Small Basket-Making.

When I decided the basket was tall enough, there was the matter of finishing it off. I could weave the end in, but it’s actually kind of hard working on Very Small things – my hands, carpel tunnelly and ornery as they are, don’t like working on projects where I have to hold thin things, like the skinny crochet hook in the picture above. I could have made a little tassle or tail of some kind, like I did with Julia’s basket-hat, but I decided, instead, to make a handle.

And then, after making the handle, of course I still had the tail end of yarn to deal with, so I wove it in and out of all the single crochet stitches in the top row of the basket, and it ended up looking like this:

Wait, here’s a closer look:

Reminds me of the fluted edge of a pie crust.

Anyway, that’s that. Oh – and in case you were wondering, the basket is about 2” in diameter at the top.

~~~

So those are some of my most recent crochet projects. I am so glad I finally learned to crochet, and annoyed with myself slightly (although there’s really no point) for not learning years ago.

I have other project ideas bouncing around in my head, and I’d been looking forward to starting at least one on my back-to-back days off this week. One one day Bill and the kids would be at work/school, and they were planning to go skiing on the next, so I’d have just about two ENTIRE DAYS to get all creative.

December 19, 2014

I was originally looking for an old post I wrote years ago that featured a little Julia, wearing fairy wings, baking cookies. I’d written it in poem form, a sort of “Night Before Christmas” thing. I was going to post that. But I got distracted by other posts from those same years, when my kids were little and I wrote a lot more.

Anyway, one post led to another, and so instead of the sweet cookie-baking fairy post, I’m going to share a different one with you. Lucky you – it features both my kids being sick!

It’s a long post, with a kind of “will it never end???” feel to it at times (much like this deceptively short intro) – which is pretty much how it felt as I went through it all. Only it’s funny to me now, from many years later. It’s a bit graphic and gross, but so is life, right?

~~~

March 02, 2009

File Under "The Joys of Motherhood"

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST MAY CONTAIN TOPICS OR GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS THAT WILL FRIGHTEN, DISGUST OR PERHAPS HORRIFY SOME PEOPLE. PLEASE USE DISCRETION WHEN CHOOSING WHETHER OR NOT TO CONTINUE.

Several nights ago I went to bed at about 10:30 or so. Eight minutes later (because I looked at the clock) I heard Julia wailing from the kids' bedroom. Not whining, mind you. Wailing. So I got out of bed faster than I would have if it was just whining, walked down the short hallway to the other bedroom, opened the door, and cringed.

She was kneeling on her bed, facing the pillow, and it was quite obvious from the smell that she had vomited. The other clue was the Laura Petrie "Oh Rob!"-style quavering cry of "I FROWED UP!"

I ushered her into the bathroom, loathe to touch her because it was dark and I didn't know what part of her had come in contact with the "frow-up." She continued to wail, mouth open, eyes squinty, without pausing for breath. I herded her toward the toilet, lifted the seat, and told her if she had to throw up again, do it IN THERE. Which she did.

While she wailed and hurled, I marched myself (muttering and complaining to myself all the while) back into the bedroom, flicked on the light (Alex didn't even wake up) and surveyed the damage.

Ugh.

I removed the rail thingy that keeps her (usually) from falling out of the bed and started stripping the sheets, rolling them up with a pillow, the mattress pad, and her beloved pink elephant, Pinky, who was not just pink at this point, but kind of orangy, with dots of yellow. That would be the corn. (Sorry.) There was a lot of corn, I discovered later. They must have had that with lunch at daycare. Lots and lots of corn.

I went back to check on Julia. She was pretty well done and just stood there, rather icky, still wailing. I said mothery things like "shhhh..." and "it's okay, it's O. Kay." to her, which didn't really do much but they sounded better than "WHYYYYYYYY?" and "OHMYGODTHESMELL!" I cleaned her up and we trooped downstairs. I brought the big mass of bedding along with me. Might as well start washing it.

Julia sat on the couch. She'd stopped wailing, but was still whimpery, which was understandable, of course. Fortunately, it was quieter. I had her scoot over while I put down a towel for her to sit on, another towel on the floor just in case, and snuggled with her under a blanket while we watched cooking shows.

"Mommy, can I have some juice?"

And thus began the rest of the night. I foolishly let her have some apple juice. I don't know why. I blame tiredness. I blame wishful thinking. But whatever. I let her have a few sips, and just like the sun, it came right back up.

"Run! Run!" And she scampered upstairs, miraculously reaching the toilet before anything else bad could happen. I told her to stay there (she was wailing again) while I went downstairs and cleaned up the latest mess. A blanket and a towel. I replaced them and this time got one of her plastic rectangular toy bins to use as a couch-side bucket. Then I went back up and soothed her and cleaned her up. I had her rinse her mouth out with some water and then brought her back downstairs again.

An hour later or something she was thirsty again. I told her no apple juice this time. But she could have a TEENY TINY sip of water.

Well, to cut this recap shorter than the hours and hours it stretched over, a couple sips resulted in another round of retching - fortunately INTO the perky pink plastic bin.

And again, later.

In between all that excitement we dozed on the couch or watched bits and pieces of food tv. I had weird dreams in between, too. But finally her vomiting was finished. All that was left was the washing up of all the blankets and towels and bedding that had been affected.

That following morning, Friday, she was okay, though I kept a tight rein on what she could and couldn't eat. Alex went to school as usual, and mid-day, Bill headed off to go skiing with three of his friends for the weekend. A trip they'd been planning far in advance. I dozed on the couch with Julia, hoping the weekend wouldn't include more digestion-related adventures.

That night at some point Julia crawled into my bed and slept the rest of the night there. I woke up around five thirty or so. And suddenly there was a scary sound. Kind of like the "pbthththt" kind of sound...only...more liquidy. And then Julia said "I haf to go to the baffroom." She scurried off and moments later I heard it. That word.

"Mo-mmmmmmmy!"

Oh no.

"I need help!"

"What's the matter, Julia?" (maybe the toilet paper roll needs to be replaced...)

"I'm doing DIARRHEA!"

And it's five-freaking-thirty in the morning.

And sure enough, she WAS doing diarrhea. She's a smart one, that little girl. Poor thing. Soon she was wailing, much like the night of the vomit, only instead of just an open-mouthed wail it kind of morphed into "Mahhhhh-mmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Over and over and over.

Her underwear was...icky. There were multiple flushings of the toilet. And - oh no. Something occurred to me. I went back into my bedroom, and...yep. I stripped the sheets. Remember that "pbthththt" sound? Yeah. That.

Anyway, I cleaned her up, brought her downstairs to watch cartoons, and sulked. I felt HUGELY sorry for myself, and I wallowed in it like a pig in...well, in Julia's princess underwear, I guess.

But then - she was fine for the rest of the day. HOORAY! My mood improved.

I let the kids stay up late to watch the Backyardigans and the Wonder Pets on Noggin, then tucked them in and went to bed as well.

Fast forward. It's oh, FIVE THIRTY again. Sunday morning. Julia is in my bed - don't know when she made that happen - and is lying perpendicular to me, her feet dangerously near my face. I was lying there with my arms up in some sort of guarding pose. And then she just woke up, announced "I haf to go to the baffroom." and off she went.

You know the movie "Groundhog Day?"

Once again. From the bathroom. "Maaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeee!"

I helped. I flushed. I tossed her underwear once again into the shower and ran it. She cried and cried "Maaaahhhhhmmmmmeeeeeeeeee!" because it was icky and scary and out of her control and her delicate little nether regions hurt from it all.

Somehow it didn't upset me that time around. I was kind of numb and resigned to it. Bill was having his skiiing weekend with his buddies, and I was having...this. Okay. I read the fine print. I signed up for this. I am indentured.

The rest of the day? She was fine.

Bill returned home late afternoon - he'd had a great weekend and was worn out and sore and tired and glad to be home. He'd brought the kids each a stuffed animal (dog for Julia, shark for Alex) and some nice locally-made (Berkshires) chocolate for me. I fed the kids. I took a long bath. Bill put the kids to bed. We watched some horrible "When Wild Animals Attack People" kind of thing on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet or something and then went to bed. I think I fell asleep around ten.

At midnight, or somewhere near there, I was woken up by sounds of one or both of my children in some sort of distress AND by Bill, who does not waken gently in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright in bed and practically yelling "Whassat!? The kids! I think one of the kids just thew up!" He was oozing urgency but not actually going anywhere, so I kind of snarled "OKAY!" and slid out of bed. This can't be happening.

But oh, it was. And was it ever.

(This would be a good time to maybe refill your beverage or run to the bathroom or stretch or something at this point.)

As I rounded the foot of our bed, a child hurried into the room. And it was Alex. And he said "Mom, I threw up." And he started to sort of...urp at that point and I spun him around and sort of shoved him out of the room probably saying something useful like "OUT!" and he threw up. Right there on the floor in front of the bathroom door.

There was a lot of it.

Unlike Julia's contribution from a few nights before, which was a kind of orangy background with many many large kernels of corn in it, this was a pale pink dotted with white.

I told you it might get graphic.

Anyway. Much of this initial burst of activity is a blur - I don't know exactly which came first, but here goes.

Alex, as I said, tossed his cookies right there on the floor just outside the bathroom. I ordered him into the bathroom - he wasn't finished, probably - and told him if he had to throw up again, throw up in the toilet. At the same time, I think, I heard, from their bedroom (the door was nearly closed) this - a thud. And then a loud wailing cry.

I stepped over the chunky puddle, pushed open the door and there, in the darkness, stood Julia, wailing and miserable.

"I FALLED DOWN IN THE FROW-UP!"

As she said it I just wanted to cry, but I also knew that at some point I would laugh about it. Just not right at that moment.

Anyway, I hollered to Alex to stay put, I switched on the light to their room, herded Julia out and then NOOOOOOOOOo - she walked right through Alex's giant chunky puddle in the hall. I yelled "Julia stop! You're stepping in it!" and she immediately froze in place (in it) and wailed louder and refused to take another step. I'm telling her "go IN THE BATHROOM" but no, all she could do was stand and wail. I had to sort of leap over the puddle and then reach across the muck and swing her up and into the bathroom.

Her hair, people. her long, long hair. It was...dotted...with...chunks.

I think it was around this point that I looked over to see how Alex was doing and noticed that - being the novice upchucker that he is - Alex hadn't lifted the seat first before making his recent deposits. The stuff was ALL OVER the seat AND it had splashed off the seat and out sideways onto the walls and the floor. I lifted the toilet seat and said nothing to Alex because there was no point and he was already miserable. And drooling. I wiped his face off and then turned on the shower and got Julia to stop wailing for a moment, took off her underwear and convinced her to go into the shower. "I DON'T WANNA TAKE A SHOWER!" "Julia there's THROW-UP IN YOUR HAIR FROM WHEN YOU FELL DOWN! YOU HAVE TO TAKE A SHOWER!" So in she went for a minute and then, well, all that running water - "I HAFTA GO TO THE BAFFROOM!" So out she came, I cleaned off the seat, let her have at it, flushed, waited for that toilet to stop running, then started the shower again and she went back in and stayed put while I went to see how much ick awaited me in their bedroom.

Ick

From the mess, I was able to reconstruct the events. Alex had initially thrown up in his bed. (I stripped that, rolled up all the sheets, pillows and the little rug beside his bed in a big, big ball.) Next, he had climbed out of bed, made it to the end of the bed and then threw up again. (On the hardwood floor. BIIIIIIG splash.) Then he came out of the room, closed the door mostly (thus rendering it dark) and proceeded to puke in the hall and then all over the toilet. Meanwhile, awakedned by all the chaos, Julia had climbed out of her bed in the dark and made her way toward the door, slipped on the mess on the floor and went down on her butt. And her hair.

I mopped up the floor in their room and started collecting towels in a garbage bag. I also cleaned the HORRIBLY YUCKY floor outside the bathroom. And the little footprints of it in the bathroom. And all around the toilet. And Alex. And then I dried off Julia. And then I sent them down to the basement, where all the cool sick people hang.

All this insanity (and it truly felt like something out of "What's Up Doc?" - probably the scene where the hotel room is on fire and everyone's coming in and going out and Eunice yells at the room service guy "FOOD? I DON"T WANT FOOD!" and Judy Maxwell appears, towel-clad, in the broken window and says "Why, Miss Burns! Don't you know the meaning of propriety?"

It kind of felt like that. Only smellier.

So anyway. Now we're all downstairs. Sick Alex. Nurturing Mommy. And Happy To Be Awake In The Middle Of The Night Julia.

I set up the towels and the slop bucket for Alex and instructed him to aim for the bucket if he felt at all like he might throw up again. I tucked him in with a blanket at one end of the couch, Julia planted herself at the other end, and I sat in the middle, wondering if I could doze upright.

Julia fell asleep pretty quickly. I'd suggested to her that she go sleep in her own bed, but that wasn't acceptable ("I can't sleep in my room BY MYSELF!") and so I just gave in quickly and quietly and let her stay. She fell asleep and stayed asleep til morning.

Alex, on the other hand, wasn't used to this sort of thing, so he was wide-eyed and showed no sign of sleeping. I kept telling him to shut his eyes and try to sleep - but to lie facing the bucket, just in case. I'm sure that "just in case" didn't help. But I couldn't stop saying it. Or the "try to sleep" thing. Wastes of breath, both phrases.

I moved over to the chair, propped my feet up on the ottoman and snuggled under a blanket. At some point - maybe it was during Iron Chef, maybe it was some time later - Alex looked troubled and grabbed for the bucket (actually a green, rectangular toy bin. Empty.) and, well, used it quite successfully. I let him heave a few times while still on the couch, but then I sent him upstairs to finish things up in the bathroom, just in case he had any more gallons of the stuff waiting in the wings. He got a little bit on one blanket, but otherwise he was very tidy.

And that was the extent of it for him. I gave him a bit of water to clean his mouth out with, but told him he couldn't have any more except MAYBE a tiny sip, because it would make him throw up again. And that may sound like propaganda designed by a lazy mother, but no, I was quite postitive that anything touching the stomach lining would immediately bring about another volcanic eruption. I would have bet on it.

At some point Alex fell asleep, and once I could hear him breathing evenly, I felt safe to let myself doze off too. I think it was after 2:30 or so. I shut my eyes and dozed.

At about 3:00, the STUPID *()&*&%%^#%$#$*&(&( alarm system went off. THREE IN THE MORNING! It was some "loss of frequency" signal that I would have to deal with during normal DAYLIGHT hours when it was safe to call the guy who installed it. I hit the reset button and silenced the awful thing, went back downstairs and tried do doze again.

Around half an hour or less later the phone rang. It was the company that monitors the alarm. They were calling to let me know they'd received a report of loss of ferquecy signal. Thanks awfully. I received it too. Goodnight.

At four I gave up on sleep and switched the tv over to the weather channel to see how the Major Winter Storm was doing, and then to the news channels to see if they'd started announcing school closings yet. Not many. I wasn't going to send Alex in to school anyway, but I was also looking to see if the school Bill works at was closing. After 5:00, when the local news came on, they closings had been updated and yippee, all schools that affected my family were closed. I changed the channel to Noggin and went upstairs to attempt to sleep in my own bed.

A little before six, the town my husband teaches in called (yes, the whole town called; they're very involved) to announce that there would be no school. Got it. Thanks.

Within the half hour, the phone rang again. Alex's school was closed, too. Really. Thanks.

So where are we? Six-thirtyish? Those calls were followed, roughly every twenty to thirty minutes, by my children. "Mommy, can we play?" "WAAAAAAAAAH!!!ALEXDOESN'TWANTTOPLAYWITHMEEEEEEEEE!" (Well he's not feeling well, Julia, he doesn't want to play at all) and Julia again wanting to climb in bed with us where it was warm - fortunately it was nowhere near five thirty so there was no danger of the whole diarrhea event taking place again. I said sure, you can climb in, just be quiet because i'm very, very tired. So she chattered away happily until Bill finally got up with her and brought her downstairs.

After that I think I slept for a good, solid 45 minutes or so. Ah, refreshing. Bill had made coffee - he'd dropped off a cup on my nightstand. I brought that down with me to reheat it and to see how Alex was doing. And I regaled my sister and my mother with the events of the night, thus doing my share of providing laughter and entertainment to my little corner of the world. Or something like that.

I had a nap later in the afternoon, which was mostly nice except for the times I was awakened by various goings-on in the house. But still - I was sleeping in my own bed, and nobody was throwing up.

Alex has spent most of the day on the couch. Bill spent two and a half hours shoveling our driveway, our front walk, and the elderly couple across the street's driveway. We and our friends across the street (next door to the elderly couple) are going to go in together on a snowblower because we're all sick of shoveling. Okay, I didn't shovel this time around. And I was so tired - just mentally fried and foggy and idiotic - that while Bill was out there grimly shoveling up the heavy, sticky wet snow I had worried myself into believing that I should be out there too, that staying up all night with sick kids was no excuse, and that Bill was probably cursing me for the lazy good-fer-nothing, couch-sitting, candy-eating oaf that I was.

Except, of course, that that wasn't the case at all. He'd told our friend across the street, K., who was also shoveling and helped out with the elderly couple's front walk while Bill did the driveway, that "Jayne was up all night with the kids, so (he) was doing the shoveling." And he went on (in our kitchen, while idiotic tears of fatigue were rolling down my cheeks) to say that both jobs were horrible. Mine was yuckier and his was physically harder, but both were unpleasant. And I felt much better. And ridiculous.

So here we are, it's nearly 7 pm now. The kids have had their baths and I'll be bringing them to bed soon. Not sure yet if Alex is going to school tomorrow or not. I'll figure that out in the morning. He's downstairs watching some animal show with Bill.

At the moment, Julia is sitting on the floor making strange constipated/growling sounds at me, wearing two sets of pink plastic princess shoes - one set on her feet, the other on her hands. Apparently she is a "My Pretty Pony" with a serious bowel obstruction.

December 15, 2014

We’ve been decorating cookies! I baked a ton of regular sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies, in assorted shapes, and on Saturday I brought my awesome niece, Natalie up to the house and she and Julia and I (and Alex, but not as much) hung out decorating cookies. Natalie made the most, and unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of all her mini works of art. Julia made a lot, ate some, and then yesterday, while I was at work, she decorated some more.

The house above is one of them.

I asked her if we could keep it. Maybe I can dip it in shellac or something to preserve it.

Last year I didn’t bake cookies, or if I did, I didn’t bake many of them. I don’t remember. Too much going on with Mom. I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t have the enthusiasm. I wanted to. I felt I should. But I finally gave myself permission not to. It’s hard to do what’s best for myself, but I scraped together some sense and did it.

Anyway, the reason I want to keep this house is because it made me smile and it made me think of my mother.

When I was little I loved to draw. I guess I did pretty well. My mother told me that, anyway. I took after my grandmother, Mom’s mother, in the artistic department. Mom, however, would tell us she couldn’t even draw a straight line. (Years later I pointed out that drawing a straight line had nothing to do with artistic capabilities, and that she was creative and artistic in plenty of other ways, if not with a paper and crayons.)

Anyway, to prove her point, Mom told me that when she was little and in school – kindergarten or an early elementary school grade – she was drawing a house and her teacher pointed out that she was doing it wrong. I know teachers weren’t always as kind as they usually are these days, and I imagine my mother was sensitive to any sort of criticism, which is why this memory stayed with her.

The teacher pointed out that she’d done the bricks in the chimney wrong. Instead of staggering them like she was “supposed to,” my mother had drawn them in a grid.

Like Julia’s cookie.

~~~

Here’s another little post from a year ago…

MotherDaughterDaughterMother

December 9, 2013

It’s happened before, not just recently, though it’s happening more frequently now.

Sometimes when I look at Julia, color fades and my vision slips backwards time-ways and I am looking through my mother’s eyes at my child self. I see how she saw me, or at least how I imagine she looked at me. It doesn’t last for long, it’s almost like a shimmer for a few seconds, and I feel my heart spin back and forth as I am me, then my mother, then me-the-child, then me the adult again.

I am hugging my children harder now. And I hug Julia hardest of all. Not because I love her more than my son, but because she is a daughter, as I am a daughter, and when I am holding her I am holding myself from the past, and my mother then, and my mother now.

And maybe myself now as well.

~~~

One of the things my mother, my sister and I have/had in common was our sense of humor. I don’t know how to describe it, but there was always (and still is, with Mere and me) a love of physical humor. Falling is funny.

There’s a scene in the movie “What’s Up, Doc?” – well, many scenes, but this one is the one that I think of first – that could get my mother laughing before it even happened.

There’s the scene where Judy and Howard have taken all the bags (and if you don’t know this movie, well, I’m sorry, but you’ve got a big gap in your movie-watching history) and are running from everyone. They end up in a Chinese dragon, which goes careening through the streets of San Francisco, leaving havoc and chaos in its wake.

Part of this chaos involves a man walking down the sidewalk. There is a white fence to his left (our right, as we watch). Suddenly, large metal trash cans come rolling down the hill behind him. He glances back at the sound, then looks back again in disbelief and starts running. The trash cans continue to chase him, and finally, in a desperate attempt to escape them, the man leaps over the fence. The camera cuts to the other side of the fence, where a peaceful and genteel afternoon luncheon is taking place. The man flies over the fence and SITS DOWN HARD on a little table, his head flinging back as the table falls over and people are jumping up from their seats in surprise.

Such a little scene, but so perfectly done and so FUNNY in its absurdity…well, Mom would start laughing before we even saw the man walking down the sidewalk. Real, from the belly, laughing.

~~~

My grandmother was the artistic one. And the musical one. Natural talents, with, I’m assuming, a little instruction at some point in her youth. The talent skipped down to her granddaughters – my sister got the music and I got the drawing/painting – and my mother got the frustration of not having the same innate abilities as her mother along with having a mother who couldn’t understand why her daughter couldn’t just play the piano easily, by ear. My mother had to practice and practice. It must have been so frustrating to have to practice and practice to become not quite as good as her mother, to whom it all came so easily. It was also frustrating to recognize a piece of music but not to be able to remember the name of it. My grandfather, while possessing no musical ability that anyone was aware of, loved music with a great passion. “Emma, play us a tune” was a common request he would make of my grandmother. And she would sit down at the piano and play all sorts of things. By ear. From memory. He loved classical music. He loved opera. He wanted my mom to be able to play the piano like her mother did, but she didn’t have that ability. I don’t know if he ever realized it, but she was so much more like him than she was like her mother. She couldn’t just sit down and play a tune, but she could listen with great joy, eyes closed, a dreamy smile on her face.

~~~

Here’s another little post from last year….

Small Mercies

December 12, 2013

I woke up at 2:30 this morning and struggled to not struggle to go back to sleep. Please, I need sleep. I finally must have dozed off, only to wake up to my alarm with the detritus of several odd and moody dreams smashing against my eyes.

I stopped at the nursing home on my way to work, about 5:30, and I was afraid I would get to her room and she would be gone. Not gone like in another room. gone gone. It's always there, that fear. It's not going to leave me. And it gets bigger every day. I think it feeds on my nightmares.

She was asleep, and I was relieved, but it's so painful to see her like this: Old. Tired. Frail.

I started this neglected little blog as a place to vent about all the insanity and frustration that comes with having an alcoholic parent. I was probably angry at the time. I've been angry a lot over the years.

And now...now I am heartbroken at what will never be again. I miss the mother I remember from the first half of my life. And, yes, portions of the second half. But alcoholism is greedy. It just takes and takes and takes. And now, there's not much left to take.

But.

When I look in my mother’s eyes now, she is there again. I don't know how long it will last, and it probably won't be very long at all, but for this precious little bit of time, I have my mom back.

December 06, 2014

This is another post from a year ago. I just lifted it from the original post – I thought of going through and tidying it up a bit, but no, I’m just going to leave it as-is.

I’ll make sure to let you know when I’m posting about stuff to do with my mother…in case it makes you sad or uncomfortable or anything like that to read it. I’m not sharing this for reaction as much as I’m looking back at that time a year ago that I barely remember except for a handful of specific episodes. I may fill in some of the gaps, too, with explanation or other stories. I just feel like I need to do this – share it, remember it all, think about all that happened, both after her diagnosis and before.

I’m typing this on a laptop that belonged to my mother. She wanted it – in addition to the desktop Dell they had – so she could tote it around and write stories from her family.

But she never did that. She had the laptop for several years. I don’t think she ever typed a thing on it. I found a legal pad with a bit of personal history, but that’s about it. I have been having moments lately where I try to remember something about my grandparents or some other portion of that side of the family, and for the splittest of seconds I think “I’ll ask Mo-“ and then I’ll stop. I feel a flare of anger and a flare of sorrow. Or maybe it’s one flare in two colors.

Anyway, this piece below is exactly a year old, to the day.

Time

Mom had an appointment with an oncologist this week. I worked half the day, then met her, Dad, my sister, and the guys who transported mom from the nursing home to the doctors’ office.

We were crowded into the small exam room – Mom on her industrial gurney (designed for transport in a vehicle), strapped in like Hannibal Lector only without the bite mask, and Mere, Me and Dad on chairs.

I filled out some paperwork that was supposed to have arrived at mom and dads house, contact information mostly, and consent to treat her.

The doctor went over mom’s information…carefully. Not sure, I think, of how much we knew or what we understood.

She said, a few times, that she didn’t know that chemo would help, that, in fact, it might make mom feel worse. She had done a bit of an exam, eyes, throat, felt her abdomen, looked at her legs, which were swollen, down at the ankles.

She reiterated that a couple of times. And it gave me the feeling that there was more she wasn’t saying. The doctor. I felt like the prognosis was more bad than good, not that there was a whole lot of good anyway.

She said a biopsy would tell them for sure what type of cancer it is, and that would determine what type of chemo and/or radiation would be best to use. Radiation was still a possibility because it wouldn’t have the side effects of chemo and it might slow down the tumor growth.

Cholangiocarcinoma is very aggressive. Who knows how long it’s been growing.

Anyway, it was weird, Mom turned to me a couple times and asked what I thought she should do. I handed that back to her…it’s her life, her call. She’s always said she didn’t want heroic measures…and that’s where it stands now.

She’s still scheduled for the stent replacement on the 23rd, and when they do that they can do a biopsy and we can maybe have some radiation done. Chemo, in addition to possibly not working and making her feel sick, would also involve at least weekly trips to the hospital for the injections, and frequent follow-ups with the doctor. A lot of travel.

So that was that. Oh, no it’s not. She also brought up hospice, and we might want to get that in place as well.

Another little moment – the Dr brought up mom’s alcohol use (or misuse, or abuse, take your pick) and mom said, very confidently, that she hasn’t had any alcohol in ages. Ages. Mere and I both called her on that. We’re the cranky Greek Chorus in Mom’s life of denial. Anyway, it’s two months, not ages.

So on the way out we shook hands with a woman who’s kind of a liason for patients and the office and families. Mere talked to her more than I did, only because they spoke the same language – medicare and related stuff. She – I don’t remember her name – was extremely nice, warm, on top of things.

The whole office was like that.

There are so many good, kind, warm people out there. There are idiots too – case in point, that annoying doctor from the other office – but a lot of wonderful people as well. The guys who transported mom – just nice guys.

Anyway.

We all went our separate ways, mom back to the nursing home, dad to his house, mere and I back to work.

And I just kept feeling like there were things unsaid.

So on the way home I called the oncologist’s office and asked for a call back, to discuss the unsaid things, like prognosis.

Dr. P called back a couple hours later, and I went outside to talk because I haven’t told the kids yet.

And she said what I kind of knew, based on what I’d read – that at the outside, with no complications, Mom’s got maybe six months.

But she’s got a lot working against that. She doesn’t eat much. She’s anemic. She doesn’t exercise at all – and this has gone on for YEARS, the fight to get her to walk, to do her PT, to MOVE. It’s been such a losing battle. So there’s that. And the swelling in her legs…the possibility of a blood clot forming and traveling to her heart…the possibility of infection – maybe from bedsores, or from the current stent…the stent could get blocked again, or the next stent could get blocked, which would mean another stent would need to go in. More procedures – more invasive procedures. She could fall into a coma.

She could have as little as a month left.

I called her oldest friend – one of her only remaining friends – that night to update her. It was a hard conversation to have. She said she’d call me back soon. She’s thinking of coming up.

I have a few other people to call, I think. But, sadly, over the years Mom has shut doors on long-standing friendships. There are only a couple of people who still call the house to say hello and to check on her, on dad. They get in touch with me if (like recently) there is something wrong with the phone at mom and dad’s house. Two people. Interestingly, both were nurses. That’s not how she knows them – one she’s known since they were five – a lifetime friendship. The other was married to my dad’s uncle, so she’s sort of a relative that way but not by blood.

But I digress.

One minute I’m fine, the next I’m not. I have times where I can talk about all this matter-of-factly, without emotions spilling over. And then other times I can’t even get a word out without my voice cracking.

Last night was the elementary school christmas concert. alex was in it. During most of it I was annoyed at this tall kid who showed up late and stood next to his mom and IN FRONT OF ME and a shorter older woman. I kept glaring at him. He’s in the eighth grade according to alex, and he is growing a mustache…much like the one his mom has.

Anyway, I fought off my short-person rage, moved to a different spot, and focused on watching Alex and listening to the songs.

And then, out of the blue, during the last song, which was about drinking hot cocoa, I suddenly felt tears welling. I don’t even know why! Hot cocoa? But then, why not?

It’s my mother. And mothers are everything. Every little bit and piece of my childhood, just about, connects to my mother. So why not hot cocoa?

I’ve got today off. It’s a paid personal day. I need it. My boss thought I needed it. I need time by myself. Time to be kind to myself and not take care of anyone else.

December 03, 2014

Okay, first you should know that this is the third or fourth attempt to start this post.

Second, that admission pretty much sums up the whole intended but unwritten post, as hinted at by the title (which took a mere two attempts).

I have recently admitted to myself – and not for the first time – that I am horrible at managing my time, some of the time. Not all of the time. But enough of the time.

I look forward to a day off, or an evening after work, to do something I want to do. Something creative.

Problem is, once I have that time, it’s hard for me to settle down or relax and just do that creative thing.

Even harder is deciding which thing to do.

Because there are too many things I could do. Too many things I want to do. Too many things I think I want to learn how to do. Too many things I think I should do.

How to decide?

I brainstormed a list recently of all the current things that I want to do or should do or whatever – anything that has “do” attached.

It’s a long list.

And it could have been longer if I’d been more specific. For example, it’s December, it’s cookie-baking time, and so I scribbled “bake cookies” with some arrows pointed at the words because that’s something that needs doing soon. But I could have, if I wanted to drive myself more crazy, written out each and every KIND of cookie that I need/want to make.

But I didn’t.

I’m trying to stave off the crazy.

Anyway…it’s a long list.

And though I know I should bake some cookies, I really feel like crocheting something.

But I can’t decide what to crochet.

You see, I have crocheted Julia a couple of elephants, and even though he’s older, I still feel like I should crochet Alex something, like a dinosaur. So I’ve found a couple of patterns for crocheted dinosaurs, but I’m not sure which one I want to do.

But I also had intended to crochet slippers for both kids. I traced around their feet and everything! So maybe I should get going on those first, because it’s winter, or nearly winter.

And then, with Christmas coming, I feel like I should probably crochet gifts for everyone I know. But I can’t do scarves, because my sister has pretty much crocheted scarves – and hats – for everyone anyway. So maybe I should crochet…um…something else. Only I don’t know what. So maybe I shouldn’t crochet gifts at all.

I’ll just bake more cookies!

Only I don’t feel like baking…

There’s also rugs. I’ve crocheted a few tee shirt rugs, and I have been, bit by bit, making more tee shirt yarn and rolling it into balls for future projects. I’ve got just about all the colored tee shirt yarn balls done, I’m just down to blacks and whites and a few grays.

I also want to make denim yarn from old jeans. I could crochet rugs out of that, too.

Speaking of making rugs, I saw another way of making rugs that would be cool to do. I just need the loom for it, but it’s twining, which is kind of weaving and twisting strips of fabric…it looks like something pretty doable. I asked Bill if he could make the loom for me. He said sure. I could probably make it, actually, but I think I have enough hobbies without adding woodworking to the mix.

Speaking of woodworking, sort of, we’ve got this chair that years and years ago my mother reupholstered. It’s got wooden arms and legs, and the seat and back are fabric (well, with wooden framing and springs inside and soft stuff so you don’t feel the springs when you’re sitting…). Anyway, the fabric she’d put on was starting to go years ago when I took it with me when I moved out, so I attempted to cover it – with cotton fabric left over from a sewing project – which was rather naïve of me and the succession of cats in my life over the years pretty much destroyed all my attempted hard work. Anyway, we’re going to redo the chair. It needs it. Structurally it’s in great shape, it just needs a makeover.

So I’ve been poking around online everywhere, watching tutorials and reading tips on DIY reupholstery. I’m feeling pretty good about it, actually. Kind of excited. I just need to pick out the fabric from my piles and piles of scraps.

Speaking of all that, we’ve also got this loveseat in the living room that needs attention. It’s a sort of fold-out affair that we got at Pier 1 a long time ago. It was very pretty with a large flower pattern that has since become grimy and torn, what with these two children that came along a while back. A bunch of years ago I got one of those “surefit” slipcovers for it, and frankly, I hate it with a passion. It sure DOESN’T fit, not really, because the whole apparent point of this line of slipcovers is that they kind of fit, but they’re rather loose, and the website said something like that you just tuck in the looseness of it like you do with your normal slipcovers. Only, I’ve never tucked in a normal slipcover. They fit WELL. I’m tired of the tucking in. Plus, when the kids sit (sprawl, lie on, roll around on, mangle) on the slipcover, it becomes untucked, and yanked off, and so then half the slipcover is on the floor, and no one else in the house seems bothered by this ugliness except me. I’m tired of re-tucking.

Oh, and last year at some point, sparks from the fireplace must have landed on part of the sloppy slipcover (probably while half of it was on the floor after one of the kids slithered around on it) so there are burned holes in it. Very pretty. I can’t tuck those in or slide them behind the loveseat.

So – I want to make a slipcover for the loveseat. One that, you know, FITS. I spent some time recently looking around online looking at tutorials and reading blog posts about making your own slipcovers. I’m kind of excited to do it.

And then there are the zippered purses. I made a few of them a couple years ago and I’ve been saving zippers from every worn out pair of pants that I’ve sliced up to salvage the fabric so that I can make more. I have ton of zippers. I haven’t made any more zippered purses. I’ve got several great design ideas, I just, you know, haven’t gotten around to making them yet. So maybe I should make some. You know, because of all those zippers….

Then there’s the paper and beads and wire…the pressed paper made of stuff I’ve shredded. Ornaments and gift tags made from the pressed paper. And wrapped or decorated with wire and beads. Or ribbon.

Oh, and the rosaries. I make rosaries, in case you didn’t know. I sell them. I should make some more to add to that inventory. But, you know, there are all these other things I want to make, too.

OH! And then there are the quilts! I have several quilts that need to be repaired. I started working on one of them a number of years ago. And then – ooh look! A butterfly!

November 28, 2014

A while back I started another blog where I could vent and no one who knows me would see it. There were things I wanted to write about – well, type, because typing is faster than writing – but I didn’t want feedback. I just needed a diary of sorts.

About a year ago my mother was diagnosed with cancer. There had been lots of other things going on with her over the years, things I didn’t write about out of respect for her and the rest of my family, and because, well…because.

Today is my mother’s birthday. We cooked Thanksgiving dinner at my Dad’s house yesterday, which was the first time in years that that house has been filled with family and food and love and peace.

Anyway, in my other blog, this is what I wrote the morning after Thanksgiving. I’ve edited it a tiny bit, but not much.

New Territory November 29, 2013

It's called Cholangiocarcinoma, which is cancer of the bile ducts that descend from the liver to the gall bladder.

It's pretty rare, and pretty uncurable.

Surgery is sometimes a possibility, with one in five people living five more years post surgery, but that's only if they're younger, much healthier in other ways, and not an eighty (now eighty-one) year old woman in not so great health who's abused her liver with way too much alcohol over the years.

Chemo and radiation are options, but only palliative.

Mom said to the doctor something like "and what if I just want to...go?"

The appointment was bizarre. Frustrating. Funny, in some ways. Far too long.

The doctor we saw wore a tweed jacket over a medium blue oxford shirt and I forget his pants. He wore a tie. And he was about the least personable doctor I've encountered in some time.

Everything's on laptops now, and for whatever reason - I know he had one, it's called "rigidity" - he had to scroll back through her history with that office - all the way to 2007 when she was diagnosed with an ulcer or something - and when my sister and I tried to get him to skip to the present, he gave us this...LOOK and told us something about needing to see her history in order to discuss what's going on now.

Many eye-rolling looks were exchanged between my sister and me during that visit.

The four of us - Mom in her wheelchair, Dad, Mere and me - were squeezed into this little exam room, and the doctor was squeezed into his desk/chair combo, squinting at his laptop and scrolling through notes from the endoscopy a week and a half prior.

He took more time than necessary to read - aloud - every bit of notation entered, AND he would stop periodically to give us definitions, or to talk percentages, or whatever, and he WOULD NOT skip over stuff we already understood.

It was, frankly, a bit of hell.

And plus, we - my sister, my father and me - already knew the diagnosis. Well, sort of. We had the gist of it, thanks to a blabby doctor who assumed my dad already knew what had been discovered during all the tests and just spelled it out for him. Right there at the weekly Rotary Club luncheon.

But anyway, so here we are with Dr. Lecture Hall, as he takes forEVER to get to the bottom line, and my mother was getting uncomfortable from sitting in the wheelchair for so long (we waited in the teeny tiny waiting room for quite a while too, ultra punctual fools that we are....) and she just wanted to lie down or go back to the nursing home where she's been transferred. The doctor showed no sympathy, compassion, or inclination to move things along. It was all at his pace.

I wanted to hurt him.

I'm pretty sure Mom knew, somewhere in that part of all of us that just knows things. Finally, while he was describing something ad nauseum, mom interrupted him with "Do I have cancer?"

He wouldn't answer. Bastard.

There's a scene in A League of Their Own right before an end-of-the-season game where a telegram delivery guy comes into the locker room and has to deliver notification that the husband of one of the women has been killed in action. He can't find, on his little clipboard, the name of the recipient, and he says he has to go back to the office or wherever to find out who it's for. Tom Hanks, the coach, wrestles the telegram away from the guy and hustles him out the door, because really? Who needs to suffer all that not knowing? Yeah, the scene was contrived, and I don't think notification of your husband's passing would be done that sloppily, but what do I know? I just know that I felt, during that doctor visit, like wrestling the laptop out of that most annoying and anal doctor's grip, scrolling through the notes myself, and finding the punch line. Faster.

I think Mom, Mere and I especially (Dad was busy looking at a diagram of cross sections of internal organs the doctor had passed around, so we could see where the liver and ducts and all those things were) were just so sick of being there, WAITING, that once we finally had confirmation, we just wanted to leave. Stretch our legs (literally or figuratively), breath some other air, get away from this guy.

But he wouldn't see that. He kept talking.

Most of the time doctors visits seem rushed, even when the doctor is classy and tries to not SEEM in a rush.

This guy...he had all the time in the world.

We also learned that the cancerous cells, which, in this sort of cancer grow in and out of the bile ducts, had grown to a larger size than the initial xrays or whatever had indicated - about 4cm instead of one - and had spread - or appeared to have spread, hard to tell with Dr. Verbose, to nearby lymph nodes and into the liver.

She has a plastic stent in the left descending bile duct, so that bile will flow and her jaundice is alleviated, and the dr recommended replacing this with a wire mesh one, which is less prone to infection and works better over a longer period of time.

But, he tossed in, it still might clog back up. And putting a stent in the other duct isn't as (relatively) simple a process.

I said we'll deal with that when we need to.

He still wouldn't stop.

So we've got an appointment now to have that stent replaced on December 23rd.

And an appointment with an oncologist on Dec 4th to discuss palliative chemo options.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving.

My sister and I met at the nursing home just before seven in the morning. She brought coffees and muffins. I brought five loaves of bread and the stuffing bowl.

The stuffing bowl is a yellow stoneware bowl that Mom has used to make stuffing every Thanksgiving in my memory. It's mine in the will. That's one of our morbid family jokes. We have several. Long-standing jokes. I get the stuffing bowl, and my sister gets the gold caps on mom's teeth.

In past years we'd meet at my parents' house to cube the bread and chop onions and celery, making stuffing while trading snide remarks and generally annoying each other. That's how we show love. And we'd stuff the turkey ("regular" stuffing in the body cavity and sausage stuffing in the neck), and once the bird went into the oven, my sister and I would go back to our respective homes, prepare whatever sides we'd volunteered for, and later in the day we'd meet up again for food. Lots of food.

In more recent years, Thanksgiving has moved to my house. There have been times - maybe one or two - when Mom came up here to help with the stuffing. But fewer of those in recent years. And I've used other bowls.

But this year, we needed to use the bowl. I'm thinking it's the last Thanksgiving we'll be able to do this, all three of us.

I feel myself grabbing at things, wanting to...I don't know...make every day a bucketload of memories, poignant looks, tears, love...and it can't happen. It will exhaust all of us. So I need to pull myself back. I go overboard sometimes.

Yesterday was also Mom's birthday. Today I'm cooking lamb and bringing it to her. Whoever else is available will join in as well.

But overnight I started wondering if that will be too much for her. A whole mess of us - husband, daughters, a son-in-law or two, grandchildren - descending on her room, surrounding her bed, trying to summon a celebratory vibe.

My kids don't know the diagnosis. Not yet.

And I may wait til after the oncologist appointment to tell them, just so I have a little more to work with.

I have moments when I just want to drop to the floor and cry. Earlier this week, I think Tuesday night, I ran a bath, with the fan on in the bathroom, just to create a lot of noise so I could sob without anyone hearing me.

It comes and goes. I'll be fine and then some little something will drift through my mind and get snagged on a corner of a memory and I'll be pressing my lips together and blinking hard.

A lot of anger has dissolved. So much anger carried around for so many years. Half my life - HALF OF MY LIFE - spent dealing with her alcoholism. Okay, there were periods of time when she wasn't drinking, but they never lasted, no matter how long they stretched. And Oh God I don't feel like writing about all that. But the missed birthdays, missed holiday, or just tense holidays with glaring and hostility and my mother demanding a drink and me trying to keep it all off my kids' radar...

Fucking pain.

And now a lot of that has melted into deep, dark sorrow. So much time...wasted. Lost. Gone. Empty.

My kids aren't going to have a ton of memories of her. And that makes me so sad. I know I'm fortunate to have known all four grandparents - not everyone has that. But my parents are alive, and are nearby, and the ONLY reason my kids don't have a deeper relationship with my parents is because of my mom's drinking. And, to be fair, my dad's contribution to her drinking. Not in driving her to it, - well, scratch that - he did. He'd drive her out to lunch so she could have her glasses of wine, or he'd drive to liquor stores and buy her booze. He helped. He helped. But.

Oh it's such a tangled history.

But anyway. My fingers are tired of typing, and I need a break from this story for now. But I've been holding all this in for so long, purposely NOT writing about it, and I don't think that's been healthy either.

October 04, 2014

He’s a little tiny elephant wearing a hat. You can’t tell from the pictures, but I used this sort of sparkly white yarn that I bought last year to make snowflakes. I’d planned to just leave him all white, but Julia wanted him to have a hat like the one in the pattern I was following (He’s Percy the Elephant, and you can make a female version with a little bow on top instead of a hat, if you want. If you crochet.)

He took a while to do, mostly because I’m not really all that experienced crochet-wise, but I enjoy it enough to unravel my mistakes and try all over again, so I think that’s a good sign.

Julia loves the two new elephants. I think she has about a thousand stuffed animal elephants. Maybe not quite that many, but it’s a lot. And here I am, adding two more to the collection.

Can’t help it. They’re cute.

I also crocheted a couple of little baby hats, for practice and for any babies that might be coming along anywhere. (NO, not me. I’m all done with that business.)

Speaking of being all done with that business, I’m really enjoying – reveling in, even – my kids at this age.

Sometimes I think back on when they were babies, or toddlers, and I do miss aspects of that. A lot of aspects. But you can’t go backwards.

And I don’t miss diapers. Or having to feed them, and then clean all the excess food out of their hair, off the high chair, off the walls, the table, the floor, and my own entire self. I don’t miss sleeplessness.

I miss all the little milestones. The smallness of them. The little tiny voices.

But I digress. And I become nostalgic.

Right now, there are lots of good things. They are old enough to be responsible about a lot of things. They aren’t always, but their average is good.

They don’t get along all the time, which is fine, and normal, and can be a headache. But when they do get along, when they are doing stuff together without being aware that I’m gazing at them with a goofy look on my face (sort of like those dreamy expressions you’d see as the opening theme song would play for some old tv shows and they’d show an actress and put her name under the image, and she wouldn’t be doing anything, she’d just be LOOKING somewhere slightly away from the camera pointed right at her. I remember being able to mimic all the facial expressions of cast members of various favorite shows. A long time ago. I don’t do it now.

ANYWAY…so my kids.

Alex, as you know, has played baseball since birth, or five years old, somewhere in there. Julia played a year of T-ball when she was five, but has been “doing gymnastics” since age three. I think she loved the physicality of it, but was never interested in the competitive or artistic aspects of it. Suddenly last spring she announced that she wanted to quit gymnastics and play softball now. Now and forever. (And I just noticed after typing “now. Now and forever” that I am still – OH THE HORROR OF IT – pressing the space bar twice after a period. I know, that is not the way to do it. But very old habits die hard, and when I learned to type back in the first half of my sophomore year in high school (ON A TYPEWRITER!!!!), we had to put two spaces after a period, or any other end-of-a-sentence piece of punctuation. And I pride myself on my speedy mad typing skillz. I swear – no disrespect to any of my other high school teachers – that typing was one of THE most useful classes I ever took. My husband never learned to type – he does the ever-so-annoying Two Index Fingers In Search of the Next Key form of typing, and if I’m in the same room when he’s typing something I either offer to type for him or I have to leave the room because slow typing is painful to me.

Probably just like too much space after final punctuation is painful to other people.

But I love my husband, so I don’t slap his fingers or push him out of the way. Because I know he can’t help how he types.

Just like I can’t help but type two spaces after a period. Or an exclamation point! Or a question mark? See? It’s like breathing for me. So please don’t slap at my fingers or push me off a chair.

I digressed again, didn’t I?

My kids. So we let Julia not go back to gymnastics and this fall she started softball.

She’s been part of the picture whenever Bill has taken Alex to a field to practice his hitting or fielding or pitching for the past bunch of years, mainly because I’d be at work and she was too young to stay home alone. But over the years she’s picked up a few things, and she’s always had a good, aggressive swing. (I maintain that she mostly just likes to hit things.) And while softball and baseball have definite differences, like, why use such a huge ball for little girls with little tiny hands, and that crazy underhand pitching, there are plenty of similarities.

So now that Julia’s on a team, Alex is much more likely to ask her if she wants to go play catch or practice hitting – without Bill being involved.

Over the summer, once Julia had said she wanted to play, yes, really really wanted to play, Bill started working with her. He bought some softballs, we sent her to a softball camp for a week, and Bill worked with her on fielding. With his (and Alex’s) coaching and encouragement and, sometimes, frustration, Julia made up her mind one day – and it really was as abrupt as that – to stop being afraid of the ball coming at her. That was it. She just stopped. And that’s huge. Balls hurt when they hit you! Softball, baseball – if it’s thrown or hit hard enough and it hits you, it hurts.

But she’s not afraid.

And she’s so much fun to watch at her games and practices. She is fearless. She is naturally athletic, and she’s so HAPPY to be playing. She beams.

She’s been playing shortstop, and then last weekend she asked her coach if she could try catching. He let her. And she looked like a natural.

I told her after the game that I was so proud of her and she did great, and she told me she was shaking the whole time because she was afraid the bat or a ball would hit her. But she loved it.

And she got to catch again today.

Alex was impressed. He doesn’t get to all of Julia’s games because sometimes his practices or games are at the same time.

I took this picture earlier in the game – Alex was giving Julia advice or feedback on something in between innings.

I love this.

I love their interactions. I love them sharing a love of a sport (or two very closely related sports). I love how kind he is. I love how she is so much more confident and proud of herself.

They are so different in some ways, but they have so much in common, as siblings do without even trying. They drive me crazy at times, and they amaze me all the time. They make me laugh and they make me gaze off, dreamily, like a sap. They are fascinating.

I love these two people.

~~~

And I guess I’ll stop here. I’ve rambled all over the place, and while I’ve probably got more to write about, I figure this is plenty for one evening.

Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. (My mom used to say that when she put us to bed. Glad I never really thought that there were such things as bedbugs, and that they really might bite me. I’d have slept in a chair.)

September 22, 2014

Bill and the kids have caught this kind of fish on several of their last trips, and we don't know what it is. So I said I'd put the pictures up and give you all the info we have, and see if anyone recognizes this guy.

It's a salt water fish. Bill was fishing in upper Narragansett Bay, the Buttonwoods area, (in RI) every time. He was fishing for skipjacks (juvenile bluefish) around low tide.

The fish seems to hang out at the bottom. Bill called it an ambush predator because of the way it went after the lures they were using. It just waited til the lure was low and jumped at it, rather than swimming around chasing it. After bill released the fish it headed straight for the bottom every time.

Long, eel-like body but it's not an eel. It has scales. You can see the teeth in the pictures.

Bill thinks it's a mature fish, not a baby.

He's been fishing these waters, this cove, for over thirty years and has never seen or caught one.

August 27, 2014

After one of the usual clamming trips this summer, I asked the kids what they’d like me to make with the clams for dinner that night. With so many clam dishes in our collective repertoire, I asked the kids to tell me their favorites.

Julia’s – clamcakes.

Alex’s – chowder AND clamcakes.

I think I’d picked Alex up after a baseball practice or something when I asked him. I seem to remember having this conversation in the car. Anyway, he thought about it some more and said it was too bad I couldn’t put chowder inside a clamcake.

And with that, the Chowdercake was born.

I thought that by combining the flavor components of our basic clam chowder with our clamcake batter, I’d get something pretty tasty.

I took some bacon trimmings out of the freezer, diced them up and rendered the fat.

I took the crispy bacon bits out of the fat and added some diced onion.

While the onions softened, I mixed flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. To that I added chopped fresh dill and thyme.

The kitchen smelled delicious, in case you were curious.

I took our freshly dug, freshly steamed clams…

and tossed them into the food processor along with the sautéed-in-bacon-fat onions, the onion fat, and a few of the crisped bacon bits. I pulsed everything together until the clams were chopped.

Scratchy summoned me from the living room.

He indicated that I hadn’t taken a picture of him lately and the world might be wondering if he was okay.

Here’s Scratchy being okay:

Back to the kitchen….

Time to put the chowder in the clamcakes!

I added eggs, the clam mixture, and clam stock to the flour mixture and started heating the oil.

I used a small ice cream scoop to drop blobs of batter into the 360F oil…

And I fried them until they were brown. I don’t have a time – it’ll depend on the size of your clamcakes, how many you’re cooking at a time, how hot your oil stays while cooking, and how light or dark on the outside you like them. I usually take out the biggest one in the first batch and split it open when I think it’s done. If it’s cooked through, I take the rest out, let the oil come back up to temp if it’s dropped, and then I use a combination of The Force and Intuition and Educated Guessing to judge the frying time of subsequent batches.

Success!

Everyone liked them. Loved them. Ate too many of them.

We could taste the bacon fat, of course, along with the clams, and with every bite we’d taste fresh dill or thyme or both.

Chowder inside the clamcake.

Thanks, Alex!

~~~~

The school year has begun. Bill went back to school a couple days before the kids did, and I had to work, so the kids were on their own.

No big deal. They’ve been home alone before. They have keys, they have cell phones, and, most importantly, they have good heads on their shoulders.

I checked in with them through the day via text, and I’d given them a list of stuff to do. It’s nice having kids who can do laundry and empty the dishwasher.

Somewhere around lunch time they asked if they could go play. The only thing left undone was a load of laundry in the dryer, and one in the washer waiting for the dryer load to get out of the way.

I asked if they’d had lunch and one of them texted back “Yes – we made nachos.”

I stared at the phone screen for a moment.

I’d shown them how to make nachos the night before.

Now, just so you know, we don’t have a microwave any more. Our old one died and I was campaigning for us NOT to replace it, but I was outvoted initially. We got a new one – smaller, though, because the other one took up way too much space on the counter – and it didn’t work right so we brought it back and decided to do a bit more research to find a better one.

And time went by and went by and went by…and we still don’t have one and Bill has said we don’t need one after all, so – yay!

But I digress.

So – nachos. When we used to have a microwave, Julia learned to melt cheese on tortilla chips in the microwave all by herself. Alex preferred to let me do the cheese melting.

The other night after Open House at the junior high (JUNIOR HIGH!!!) Alex was hungry and asked if I’d make him some fake nachos. We didn’t have tortilla chips, so he suggested saltines. Okay. Why not?

And it worked – the crackers stayed crispy. I used a mix of shredded cheddar and mozzarella. And when he wanted more, I brought him upstairs and showed him how to make them. In the oven.

So that following day, my kids made themselves a hot lunch in the oven.

And they remembered to turn the oven off when they were done.

I felt this wave of emotion wash over me. I was proud of them…and kind of proud of me, too.

I am – like, I suspect, many parents – often wondering if I’m “doing it right.” Am I teaching them what they need to know, am I raising good kids, hardworking kids, kids who will become good adults who can take care of themselves out there in the big wide world? Will they be okay?

And at the same time there’s a part of me that likes being needed. Mommy? Can you – tie my shoe, pour the cereal, make my sandwich, bring me to the playground, get me some water, give me a hug, kiss me goodnight?

I like being Mommy. But I know that it’s my job to raise them up so they don’t need me so much. The only time they were mine-all-mine was when they were in the womb. From the day they were born, it has been my job to hold them tightly and, finger by finger, hug by hug, to let them go.

Fortunately, it’s kind of a one step forward, two steps back kind of process. Much easier on me – and them.

So. The nachos.

I was proud of us. I taught them. They learned. They did.

I told them they could go play.

~~~

Another first day of school.

My boy is now a seventh grader. My daughter is a fifth grader.

They don’t need me to linger with them. They don’t need me, really, to walk with them, but I still walked part of the way with Alex and all the way with Julia.

I confess – it was unexpectedly hard to let Alex go off on his own. But I did it. I felt my eyes prickling, but I also felt good. He’s a capable kid. He’ll be fine. Or at least that’s what I told the other Mommy in my head who kind of wanted to drive him to the bus stop and wait there until the bus carried him away. I shut her off. She wasn’t helping.

I walked with Julia, we found out which teacher she had, and pretty soon she and her classmates marched into the building and I stood there in the school courtyard, surrounded by countless other parents and children, and I felt…alone.

August 20, 2014

You know how zucchini is. It hides, camouflaged, in the shade of its large leaves, and one day you spot a tiny little zucchini at the base of a flower and you think “It’s too tiny to pick now, but in a day or two, it’ll be the perfect size!” And then you forget all about it, or it hides, and when you take a peek under those leaves again, tiny baby zucchini has grown to the size of your old Subaru Outback, which was also green, though a different shade.

In past years we’ve shredded the zucchini (well, Bill has done all this, but I say “we” because we’re all in this together, mi casa es su case, mi zucchini es su zucchini, and because I write the posts on this website) and made it into tons of veggie burgers for the freezer. Bill has perfected the recipe and technique, and they come out really good.

But Julia doesn’t like them. I think it’s the texture, but I don’t really know. I like to blame texture because I don’t want my kids to sound like picky eaters. They aren’t, either. They, like all of us, just have things they like and don’t like. Julia likes fish eyeballs. She doesn’t like veggie burgers. Fair enough.

Anyway, I wanted to make something new with some of our zucchini this year. I’ve done zucchini breads/muffins, grilled zucchini, fried zucchini, zucchini chocolate chip cookies. Bill does the veggie burgers, and we add shredded zucchini to pasta dishes, various Asian dishes, and just about anything else we can think of.

I thought I’d like to make latkes.

I love latkes – I pretty much love anything that includes potato – and I thought subbing some zucchini for some of the potato would be a yummy idea.

Just to be sure that it was a good idea, I looked up “zucchini latkes” online and found tons of recipes.

I picked this one from Smitten Kitchen. Well, I did at first, and then when I was reading it I noticed the little note right above the recipe.

Zucchini Fritters, also on Smitten Kitchen, sounded even better than the latkes, primarily because I didn’t actually have any potatoes anyway.

I made some changes to the recipe, and I am elated to tell you that EVERYONE in our household LOVES them.

I love them because they’re delicious, and I really love them because Alex loves them. And I say that because he’s not fond of eggplant. (I think it’s a texture thing, hahahaha.) So when I make eggplant parmesan – which the rest of us adore – he just eats the cheese and the accompanying pasta. He likes chicken parmesan, but I don’t make that a lot. Probably because I’m a mean mother.

Anyway, when Alex declared his undying love for the zucchini fritters, I thought, almost immediately, AHA! I can make zucchini fritter parmesan!!! I haven’t done it yet, but I will, trust me on that.

Anyway, here’s what I did, and the recipe is at the end.

First up, I shredded the zucchini. I used the shredding attachment on my food processor, as recommended in the recipe, but you can also use a box shredder. I salted the zucchini and let it drain in a colander for a little while.

While the zucchini drained, I meandered out to the garden with a bowl and my little blue-handled knife with the curved blade, the one I use to harvest things in the garden. I picked (or cut) basil, oregano and chives.

And some lemon thyme. I thought the purple flowers would be pretty in the fritters.

This is part of the “made some changes to the recipe” thing I mentioned. I wanted to beef up (or herb up) the flavor. I rinsed the leaves and chopped the basil and chives and the bigger oregano leaves. I just stripped the flowers and leaves off the lemon thyme stems.

My other change was the addition of a whole lot of grated Parmesan cheese. But I’ll get to that.

Once the zucchini had drained, I squeezed as much liquid out of it as I could and put all the shrunken shreds in a big bowl.

I didn’t squeeze enough in the first batch, so I made sure to squeeze a lot more in subsequent batches.

To this I added more salt, some black pepper, the chopped herbs, and an egg, and mixed it all together. Then I added flour, baking powder and the grated cheese and folded everything together.

Mmmm! Sticky and goopy!

Then I just fried little blobs of the mixture in some oil and kept them all warm until dinnertime. I used an ice cream scoop to portion out the fritters, and that worked just fine.

Now, while all that was going on, I also threw together a quick garlicky marinara. I used two cans of plum tomatoes, a whole bunch of roasted garlic in oil that I had in the fridge, oregano, basil, salt, pepper…that’s about it. I simmered everything together while I made the fritters and cooked some pasta, and then I pureed it with my trusty little immersion blender before pouring it over the zucchini fritters and the pasta. I was told it was the best marinara I’d ever made. :)

I’ve managed to freeze some zucchini fritters, actually, but most of them end up devoured the day I make them. Kind of nice for my ego. And kind of a nice way to use up some zucchini!

Here’s the recipe. You can increase or decrease amounts, of course, depending on the size of your harvest.

salt and pepper to taste (about a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper)

1/2 cup flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

4 T grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

~~~~~

Oil for frying

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. Salt the shredded zucchini and put it in a colander for about ten or fifteen minutes to drain. Working in batches, put zucchini in a cotton dishcloth or in some cheesecloth and squeeze out as much liquid as you can. Really squeeze hard.

2. In a large bowl, combine squeezed zucchini, chopped herbs, egg, and salt and pepper.

3. Whisk together flour, baking powder and cheese. Fold into the zucchini mixture.

4. Heat about 1/4” of oil (deep) in a pan until it shimmers. Then carefully drop portions of the zucchini mixture (I used a small ice cream scoop, you can go as big or as small as you like) into the hot oil. Be careful – the hot oil will splatter.

5. Fry until dark golden brown on bottom, then carefully flip each fritter over and fry on the other side. Drain on paper towels or brown paper bags and keep fritters warm in a low oven.

6. Serve with pasta and marinara if you would like to, or with dollops of sour cream, or applesauce, or Sriracha mayonnaise, or some hot sauce, or salsa, or whatever other yummy concoction that occurs to you.

July 30, 2014

A couple of weeks ago. It was this year’s anniversary gift to ourselves.

It’s the Nesco American Harvest Garden Master FD-1018P 1000 Watt Food Dehydrator. We got the kit, which included a total of 8 trays plus 8 fruit leather inserts (solid flexible plastic pieces) and 8 smaller mesh screens for drying things that might fall through the regular trays like small herbs, soft fruit, and a book about drying stuff and making jerky.

At first Bill’s main interest in the dehydrator was because we could make a whole mess of jerky with it. My big plan was to make fruit leathers and dehydrated fruits and potato chips – healthier snacks for my kids and husband to bring to school with them in the upcoming school years.

My sister got a dehydrator a little over a year ago and loves it. She’s been telling me I need to get one, and I’ve been telling her she needs to get a pressure canner. Guess I’ve got the better listening ears in the family…

Anyway, Meredith (my sister) also makes her own chili powders with the bazillion hot peppers from her garden, and she uses it to dehydrate tomatoes, too. That, plus she makes fruit leathers and dehydrates fruits, and herbs, and who knows what else.

Anyway, we ordered it a little before our anniversary and it arrived the day before – yay!

The first things I made were strawberry fruit leather and watermelon candy.

I’d seen the watermelon idea on Pinterest, I think. Someone (I know, I didn’t save the link, I’m horrid) just sliced up some watermelon in thin – quarter inch thick – pieces and dehydrated them. That’s it. And she said they were like candy.

Sounded good to me.

For the leather, I just pureed a gallon of the strawberries in our freezer from this year’s bumper crop and poured them, as directed, on the fruit leather plastic sheets.

Kind of like this:

and this

But those two aren’t pure strawberry.

The kids weren’t nuts about the first batch of fruit leather. The flavor was too intense and kind of tart. I’ve since seen other recipes for strawberry leather that include sugar. Bill likes it, though, and so do I.

Anyway, the very first picture in this post is some of the original strawberry leather I made.

And I have to stop here and tell you one of the unexpected side benefits of dehydrating fruit – the aroma! Our house smelled like strawberries! Real strawberries! So get a dehydrator – ditch your icky fake air fresheners!

But I digress…

These two most recent pictures are from today’s variation – I added watermelon and a little – very little – sugar. Julia taste-tested the liquid before I poured it out. She just wanted to drink it, never mind make anything else with it, so I figured I was on the right track.

It’s still in the dehydrator, so I don’t know if it’s a success or not. I’ll let you know.

Besides that, I’ve done some fruit.

Watermelon – my second favorite so far. This was yesterday when I stacked it up:

And here’s the finished product:

Kind of looks like a raw beef jerky, doesn’t it? But it’s not. It’s watermelon. Very watermelon. Chewy, with a very intense watermelon flavor. Because – hey! It’s real watermelon!

I’ve dehydrated mango, which Bill likes best so far.

Yesterday I also did some kiwi (my personal favorite) -

Kiwi is pretty.

And, the newest fruit in my new repertoire, pineapple:

Dried, the pineapple kind of looks like mushrooms. Chicken of the woods, maybe.

Like all the fruits I’ve dehydrated so far, the finished product keeps the flavor and really only changes in texture.

It tastes real, you know?

A couple months ago, maybe, I saw dried kiwi in the store and was so excited about it. Until I bought some.

First of all, they didn’t taste like kiwi or anything else real. I’m sure I read the label, but I don’t remember what else was added to the poor little kiwi slices. I think I blocked it out because, frankly, I’m annoyed with myself for not reading the ingredients before I bought the stuff. The too-green color should have clued me in, but I don’t know, maybe I was really, really tired at the time.

Anyway, I have seen the light, and I’ll do my own dehydrating from now on.

It’s so cool!

You should listen to my sister – get a dehydrator!

Oh – but wait! There’s more!

I don’t have pictures, yet, but I am planning to make a new batch soon.

I’ve made potato chips.

Not sliced potato chips, mind you, but more along the lines of baked chips or some sort of faux-chip you might find in a can on your grocery store shelf…things with all sorts of artificial and highly addictively-flavored ingredients. Julia loves that stuff and would eat it all the time if I let her.

Anyway, I’d seen several versions online, so I figured I’d give homemade un-chip chips a try. I baked a bunch of russet potatoes, scooped the cooked innards out, and pureed them with some butter, water, and salt. I poured the mixture out just like I did when making the fruit leather, and let the dehydrator run overnight.

My potato slurry was too thin, resulting in see-through sections of chips, so I’ll fix that next time around, but they tasted good! They tasted like potato!

Best of all, Julia probably ate most of them. She is also on board with concocting different flavors for subsequent batches. She really likes salt and vinegar. Or buffalo. Or barbecue.

July 08, 2014

My birthday crept up on me several days ago, as birthdays like to do, and despite my dread about being older, I enjoyed the day.

It was a different sort of birthday.

My mom is gone.

And while there were a bunch of birthdays in the second half of my life where my mom did not think to or remember to call me on my birthday, and so in a way it was not entirely different not to hear from her, it was different this year because I couldn’t be angry about it. I couldn’t be angry with her.

Well, I could, but there was no longer a point.

And so I was sad about not being able to be angry with her for forgetting about me on my birthday, and I was sad, also, about not hearing from her like I did on about 75% of my birthdays, from birth on.

She used to make me strawberry shortcake for my breakfast on my birthday.

Not in a many years, of course, since I haven’t lived at home for much of my life now, but it’s still a special memory. And with all the strawberries our garden bombarded us with this June, I had my share of strawberry shortcake, strawberry cream cake, strawberries with whipped cream, strawberry rhubarb pie, and warm just-picked strawberries with the dirt brushed off while standing in the middle of our ever-larger strawberry patch. I’ve also got a lot of strawberries in the freezer, which will be transformed into jams and pie filling and other goodies on a day less humid than this one.

But I’ve gotten off track.

I worked on my birthday. I’m glad for that. While I am normally not one to want much attention, especially about my awkward age (pretty much all of my ages are awkward, come to think of it), on this birthday, I finally recognized it – the unrelenting birthday wishes from my coworkers – for what it was.

Love.

Or, at least, like-a-whole-lot.

It was verbal hugs. And I successfully grappled with the urge to run off and hide. I think I conducted myself pretty maturely for a change, actually.

I smiled.

I said thank you.

And I relaxed into the warmth.

Toward the end of the work day, while I was slightly bent over a big bowl of cole slaw in the making, I looked up to see our executive chef and our sous chef standing before me with a small cake and a bouquet of flowers.

The flowers were blue hyacinths and Queen Anne’s Lace.

The cake – from the bakery in the store where I work – was a strawberry cream cake.

I came close to crying, but I pushed it off.

I am so fortunate to be where I am right now. I am working in a store that existed, in smaller form, in the town where I was born and raised, right down the street from the house I grew up in.

I get to cook and make food.

I know my mother was happy about me working there. About me cooking. Preparing food.

I work with some awesome men and women, and in the women, particularly, I feel like I’ve found an extended family of sorts. In my mind I am sometimes in an old farmhouse kitchen, clad in my long dress and apron, baking bread for the week (though I don’t do any baking in my job), and putting food up for the winter and feeding my large family. It’s not so much the food prep, though, that I love. It’s the conversation. The stories. The advice. The support.

It’s a mother/sister/daughter/friend sort of thing.

My words don’t do it justice.

I just know I am happy to go to work.

I shared the small cake with my dad, and then went home to my wonderful little family.

They’d made me a card, and poured me a glass of pomegranate lemonade, and then gave me my gift.

Now, usually my gift includes chocolate. Good chocolate. Favorite chocolate.

But I didn’t want chocolate. I told Bill that I’d prefer no chocolate mainly because it’s July and it’s too warm for chocolate.

I asked, or hinted broadly, but meekly because I didn’t want to ASK for anything, for a Barnes & Noble gift card.

And that’s what they gave me.

This morning, just a couple hours ago, that’s where I went.

And I didn’t hurry.

I’m off today and tomorrow, and usually I have about eight million things I need to/want to/feel-like-I-should do on my days off, so I try to cram as much in as possible, stretching my multi-tasking super powers to their very limits. I’d originally planned to make a bunch of jams and canned stuff until I learned that the day would be very hot and humid. The strawberries, frozen, will keep.

So off I went.

Alone.

All by myself.

Solo.

Solitarily.

On a shopping trip just for me.

It crossed my mind that I could probably buy Alex and Julia each a book with part of my gift card.

I waved at the thought as it continued past. I decided to do what I was supposed to do – buy books for me.

Several weeks ago, when the school year was just about finished, both my kids came home with – horrors – summer reading and math work to do. I thought about how wonderful it would be if someone told me I HAD to read some books – new books – over the summer, and then wondered what I’d read. On my personal Facebook page, I asked for suggestions.

I got all kinds of great ideas, too. I selected a few to look for – couldn’t purchase all of them – and headed – slowly – into the store.

I emphasize the “slowly” portion of my day.

I don’t walk slowly well. It could be from going for walks with my briskly striding grandfather when I was small and had to scurry to keep up. It could be from hurrying to get to class before the second bell in high school. It could be from my first job as a busgirl in a busy restaurant. I don’t know.

But anyway, I tend not to meander.

This morning, however, I chose to take my time. I chose to stop and read alllllll the titles on this table and that table and those New Release shelves and alllllll those bargain book shelves.

I went slow.

In the cooking section I came very close to buying Michael Ruhlman’s latest book Egg. Very close. But I opted to go for less expensive quantity, rather than a single hardcover. But I still think I will add that book to my shelves. Maybe for Christmas.

Anyway, I explored some more, picking books off shelves and reading random pages to see if the writing was what I was looking for right now. I saw any number of biographies I’d like to read, and some histories, OH I FORGOT TO LOOK IN THE SPORTS SECTION! (They rearranged the book store probably two years ago and I still can’t figure out where they put Sports)

Anyway, I finally ended up in Fiction. And that’s what I bought.

And I had to narrow it down – I didn’t want to go over the gift card amount, though, of course, when I got home and proudly announced I’d only gone over by twenty seven cents, he said “Oh, I wouldn’t have cared if you went over by twenty seven dollars,” I thought GAAAAAAAAAAA!!! I COULD HAVE BOUGHT THAT OTHER BOOK, TOO!

Anyway, after slow consideration, and the knowledge that the other books will still be out there in the book world waiting for me later, I chose three books.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth

Laurel Corona’s The Mapmaker’s Daughter

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

Now, I have a confession to make.

One of the criteria when I was making my choice was…well, you know when you buy fruit at the grocery store and you’re supposed to choose fruit that feels heavy for its size? That’s kind of what I did when I was perusing all the books. Even if something looked kind of interesting, I didn’t want any skinny books. In fact, I very nearly bought Stephen King’s Under the Dome BECAUSE it weighed more than a watermelon and I knew I’d be in for an awesome LONG read.

So, yeah, all three books are a good thickness and don’t have enormous print.

I am laughing as I confess this.

I’ve never read The Good Earth, and I felt like it was long overdue, so that’s how I settled on that one.

I’ve read some of Barbara Kingsolver’s books – two or three – and my favorite is her nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is curled along the edges of the cover because I’ve read it and reread it so much.

And I think I’d heard of The Mapmaker’s Daughter because there was a sense of “Oh…yeah…” when I saw it on the shelf.

March 23, 2014

Okay, that’s not a scrap. It’s a big honkin’ sausage. Isn’t it pretty? Bill and John got together and made about ten pounds of this lovely breakfasty sort of sausage – delicious with sage and garlic and ginger and, of course, pork. And, well, there’s none left. So I can’t share.

That was on March 1st.

This one was the next morning. Yeah, there’s still snow, but if you look closely, you can definitely find some signs of spring….

Hello, Mr. Robin!

There were about four or five robins rooting around in the leaves, looking for bits of vines and twigs so they can build their nests BECAUSE IN THE MINDS OF ROBINS, IT’S SPRING, DARNIT!

They made sheets of pasta, and from those, Bill made a fabulous sausage and butternut ravioli.

It was really, really yummy.

Sorry, there’s none left. It was a few weeks ago, after all.

And here’s what we had for dinner on St. Patrick’s Day Eve. No, it’s not the traditional boiled corned beef and cabbage dinner.

We’re not huge fans of the boiled part.

And we don’t really celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, either. We simply look on it as a reminder to eat some brisket.

Bill picked up a couple of corned beef briskets at the grocery store, and then, instead of boiling them, he smoked them for a bunch of hours, til they’d reached an internal temperature of 150F, then braised them for another three hours, using some of our homemade, home-canned beef stock as the liquid.

February 17, 2014

I’m finally getting around to making window quilts for the two windows in Bill’s and my room.

Last year I made them for the two bathrooms and the kids’ rooms, but I ran out of steam, motivation, time, cold weather and didn’t get to ours.

I’m still kind of late. It might have been better if I’d done these in the fall, so as to be better prepared for the actual winter temperatures, but…well, you do what you can do.

Anyway, last year I wanted to create these pretty stained glass window sort of quilts, and I had sketched them out and everything.

This year, I don’t have the same enthusiasm for them. I needed something simpler. Something I could get done.

So I chose plaids and stripes. I dug through all my fabric and pulled out pieces from lots of Bill’s old shirts, things the kids have worn, miscellaneous scraps from who knows where. And I threw in a fabric that doesn’t have stripes or plaid at all, just to be wild and crazy.

And then, to be even more wild and crazy, I decided that each quilt would have exactly the same fabrics – same number of pieces of each fabric, in fact – but they would be designed differently.

So here they are. Well, not finished yet, but the tops are put together and all I need to do is attach filling and backing and bind them off.

I showed them both to Bill, and he likes the first one better, while I prefer the second one. Mostly, though, I like the fact that they’ve got all the same pieces, but they’re so different.

I hope to have them completely put together and hanging on our windows by the end of the week. I’ll post final pictures then.

So, just curious. Do you prefer one over the other (if you like them at all, and if you have a preference)? Which one? Why?

February 15, 2014

Last spring or summer I made strips of “yarn” from old tee shirts, and finger-crocheted them into long strands, and then started stitching them together in a spiral to make a rug for Julia’s room. I had another bunch of yarn ready for a rug for Alex’s room too. My problem – which happened again and again, after ripping out stitches and starting over…and over – was that the rug kept bumping up in the middle. I know I was pulling the stitches too tight, and no matter how loosely I thought I was stitching, it happened again and again.

So the other day I thought – hey! I know how to crochet now! I could just…crochet a rug!

And with the accompanying enthusiasm, plus a couple days off from work, I unraveled alllllllllllllll the yarn in the rug and the rug-to-be, and got my biggest crochet hook and started crocheting in the round.

Well, I still ended up with problems…bumping up…buckling…and so I kind of stopped trying to be consistent in my stitches. I would do some double crochet, then if I thought the situation warranted it, I’d do a chain and then a single crochet…I abandoned a pattern and just free-formed it.

And the above picture is Julia’s rug. I think it sort of looks like a flower. Or a really colorful lily pad.

Anyway, I also did one for Alex, his began as more of an oval shape but still ended up freeform. But it’s finished, which was my goal.

I’m trying to ignore some of my perfectionist tendencies. I think they cripple my productivity.

Last thing I had to do – make them non-skid. I’d heard you can use caulk on the underside, and then I read that you can use a hot glue gun. I didn’t have caulk, but I’ve got the glue gun, so just moments ago I ran strips of hot glue on the backs of the rugs.

And, minutes later, the glue had dried and the rugs were finished!

Here’s Alex’s from the top.

So that’s that! Rugs are in bedrooms now, and I can cross that little project off my to-do list.

February 11, 2014

I haven’t been crocheting for very long, but I’ve practiced some stitches and I’ve successfully made a few things.

My first great success was a hat:

I learned to make a flower and a granny square:

And then I made a hat and a scarf for Julia. The hat was double and single crochet stitches, and for the scarf I learned a shell stitch. You can’t tell from this picture, but the yarn is sparkly, like newly fallen snow…:

So with all that expertise, I was ready to create something on my own.

But I have to back up a bit first. My fabulous niece, Natalie, has a wonderful and quirky sense of humor. And she likes cats. Both of these attributes are evident in a hideous sweatshirt she owns – it’s gray and is covered with…cat heads. Yes. Disembodied cat heads. It’s…well, it’s weird. A bit disturbing. And funny.

Oh, and also, she likes boots. She has something like twelve thousand pairs of boots. Okay, maybe not quite that many. But lots of them.

So I thought I’d make boot cuffs. You know, they look like the tops of really tall socks sticking out of the tops of boots…but they don’t cover your feet, and are therefore less bulky inside the boot.

Or you could think of them as smallish leg warmers.

Anyway, when I do Pinterest searches for crocheted things, boot cuffs frequently appear.

And…because I have my own quirky sense of humor…I decided the boot cuffs should include disembodied cat heads.

So I made boot cuffs – beautiful brick red cuffs – they weren’t terribly difficult, and I used this pattern but without buttons.

And then I looked around online some more and figured out a way to make some cat heads…

If I were to do them again, I might make a change or two, but overall I was pretty happy with them.

So next, I attached them to the boot cuffs.

Oh – and I decided there should also be tails…

I had plenty of red yarn leftover, too, so I made a scarf to go along with the cuffs…

I had a lot of fun making the cat cuffs. They were silly and a good learning experience and they made me laugh at a time when I needed to find things to laugh about.

And best of all, my awesome niece, Natalie, liked them.

(That’s Julia in her own boots, posing next to Natalie.)

~~~

I’d had another crocheting project I wanted to make for Christmas, but I just couldn’t get to it. Them, actually. But I finally made them both and delivered them yesterday.

For my nephew’s son. (I know…that would make the child my great nephew. And I am, therefore, his great-aunt. And while I like the “great” description, it makes me feel old. So I prefer “Awesome Aunt.”)

Anyway, my nephew and his wife have an adorable little boy.

In November, I think, or maybe early December, I went to their house to take pictures of their adorable son to use for their Christmas card. While I was there, I noticed several owls in the nursery.

So that put the idea in my head.

And after looking around online, and finding a couple of patterns, here’s what I made:

So technically these owls weren’t from December, but they were supposed to be, so I’ve included them.

And currently I’m working on window quilts for the two windows in our bedroom. As you may or may not know, I made four window quilts last year, for the two bathrooms and for my kids’ rooms. Finally getting around to ours. I’ll show you when they’re finished. Or at least when the tops are both put together.

January 28, 2014

November 25, 2013

I think I’m taking a break. I could be wrong – it seems as soon as I decide I’m not going to write any more for a while a floodgate of sorts opens and I start posting twice a day.

But anyway.

I think I’m taking a break.

I’ve been feeling a greater and greater disconnect from this website for a while now. At first I thought it was – a year and a half ago – that I’d begun working as a cook and suddenly felt that I really had no right blogging about cooking because there is so much I DON’T know…I felt like a pretender to something I wasn’t.

I know, I think about the stupidest things for way too long.

Anyway, there was that.

But once I got a bit over feeling like a fake, I decided I’d just post about food sometimes, but without any authoritative tone in my writing voice.

But still…that fire is so much smaller now.

I think I just don’t feel like I’m her any more. The barefootkitchenwitch.

Things are changing in my life…well, of course, things are always changing in all our lives, right?…but in conjunction with those changes, I feel like

Oh hell I don’t even know how to say what I’m saying, because I’m keeping some stuff private, only I don’t want to – my urge is to write it all out, but frankly, I don’t feel like sharing with the universe just yet.

And putting that restriction on my own writing seems to have rendered me unable to write about anything except the occasional Scratchy post.

So I guess what I’m saying is I’m not sure what I’m doing just yet, but if I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

November 16, 2013

We’ve rearranged the living room a bit. We’re using the fireplace now, so I moved some of the furniture so it faces – or is at least angled toward – the fireplace and the warmth and the ever-changing collage of glowing embers and dancing flames.

Scratchy likes this time of year, and he especially loves this loveseat because it’s closest to the warmth. Perfect spot for napping.

And his companion? That’s Zulu, a wild African Dog, adopted from the local zoo. Usually he hangs out in Julia’s room, but this evening he was snoozing on the couch. Scratchy thought about reminding Zulu that cozy spots by the fire do, by long tradition, belong to cats, not dogs…but Zulu’s teeth showed occasionally while he snored, so Scratchy, whose teeth are certainly sharp but nowhere near as big, decided that sharing was much nicer than bleeding.

November 01, 2013

Have you heard of those looms? The ones that use little rubber bands to make bracelets or even necklaces or rings? Julia wanted one SO BAD after some of her friends started making the bracelets and giving them to each other. She’d been the recipient, but she wanted to be the maker and the giver, too. So we got her some of the rubber bands (the store was out of the loom), and she learned to do a simple “fishtail” bracelet just using her fingers to weave the bands together. But there’s only so much you can do with that pattern.

She really really wanted the loom.

So we got her one.

And the day I brought it home, she sat down with it DETERMINED to make one of the harder bracelet patterns on the website.

Naturally her ebullience gave way to tears of frustration because it wasn’t as easy as she’d expected it to be.

I tried to reason (ha!) with her. She’d only JUST GOT the loom. Hadn’t even had it for two hours yet – maybe she should try an easier pattern to start with. It’s like playing guitar…you have to start with the simpler pieces before you can play the more complex ones.

She started over. And got a bit farther this time, but still hit some sort of snag and again she was in tears because she just couldn’t do it.

Well, no bracelets were made on the loom that night. And she didn’t use it for the next several days, just sticking to the ones she could make using her fingers. I’d occasionally mention the loom, mainly because I’d gone and bought the thing and thought she really should give it another try, but I didn’t push too hard.

She tried again one day when I was at work. Bill told me about it – oh, the tears. I believed he used the term “meltdown” when describing her emotional state.

But eventually…finally…she got the hang of it. And now she’s making bracelets for everyone. Cranking them out in no time, and very proud of her color choices and patterns.

It’s hard watching that period of frustration. I wanted to help her, but I’ve never used one of those things AND I had only ever used a crochet hook to crochet a really, really long chain – just never got the hang of it, so what help would I be with her and her rubber bands and loom? None.

But that’s the thing – it’s not my job to make it easier for her. It’s my job to give her sympathetic hugs and words of encouragement and attempt to put it in perspective for her with my maternal wisdom….and then give her even bigger hugs when she finally gets it, when the whole thing clicks in her mind and in her hands, and she’s off and running (or weaving or whatever you call it on those looms).

~~~

Maybe because I had never learned to crochet, this whole loom thing got me somehow wanting to crochet something. My sister crochets. My maternal grandmother used to crochet up a storm. But it was never my thing. I learned to knit, and made everyone scarves one year for Christmas. But my interest in it lapsed at some point. I tended to gravitate toward fabric…quilts, pillows, wall hangings….

But still. With Julia’s mastery of the rubber band loom, my lack of crochet skills started to bother me.

So maybe a week ago I treated myself to a couple of crochet hooks – really pretty wooden ones – some yarn, and a pair of bamboo knitting needles because they were inexpensive and lightweight and I knew if I failed with the crochet needles, I could always knit something with whatever I unraveled during my meltdown.

I found a picture tutorial online – well, zillions of them – and one night I sat myself down and started to learn. I knew how to make a chain, so that saved me a nanosecond of time. Next it was time to learn to single crochet. That involved poking my crochet hook under that stitch and yarning over and making sure to count my stitches and not to have too much tension in the yarn because the stitches would be too tight and just get tighter with every subsequent row and eventually I wouldn’t be able to wrestle my crochet hook out of the yarn. Or something like that. And you don’t want to have to little tension, either, because then whatever it is you’re making will be all loose and loopy and probably get caught on heavy machinery and strangle you. Or something like that.

But I was determined.

I made my crappy stitches and unraveled them because they were too tight or some were tight and some were loopy so it wasn’t consistent…and I tried again. And it was frustrating.

But…again..I was determined.

So much so that by the time I was ready for bed that night – long after everyone else – I had a little odd-looking piece of something like crocheting to show for my efforts:

I took this picture the next morning with my phone so I could send it to my sister. I think I was in need of encouragement.

Oh, and ignore all the loops of yarn around the hook – that was just so it didn’t unravel on its own.

Now, rah rah, I crocheted (or something like it) several little rows – each successively tighter than the one before it. But I just didn’t feel like I was doing it right. It seemed too hard to do, and at first I blamed my own too-tight stitches and excess tension in my hands for the difficulty, but…..I still had the nagging feeling that I was really just doing it wrong.

So I unraveled the piece above and put it and my crochet hook aside for a little while. Not forgotten. Just put aside until I could find some time to find another tutorial that might help me figure out what was off.

~~~

I had today off from work. Bill was at work, the kids were at school, and I’d decided it would really be a day OFF – no dishes, no laundry, no doing anything like that.

For the first couple of hours after everyone had left, I did absolutely nothing at all. Well, okay, I made and ate breakfast. I sat on the couch. I watched TV. I scrolled through Facebook and Pinterest and checked my email. But that was it.

And then, mid-morning, I got tired of wasting my day. So I got my yarn and my crochet hook and a book on needlework that my mother gave me for Christmas a long time ago. I tried to figure out what I seemed to be doing wrong, but I couldn’t really figure out the pictures in the book. I saw in the little diagrams where my hook was supposed to go, or where it looked like it was supposed to go, and what I was supposed to do next, but I still just didn’t get it. I knew I wasn’t getting it. Again, it just seemed too hard. Like I was forcing something that didn’t really need to be forced.

Anyway, I found a couple of video tutorials online. Maybe a kind voice explaining the process AND showing it would work better.

First tutorial – nope. Just like the picture tutorials only with words.

It was the angle of view that was messing with me.

That, and, frankly, my hands. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got carpal tunnel issues with both hands. Sometimes more than just issues. Sometimes it really, really sucks. I wake up with numbness in one or both hands, or parts of them, most mornings. I drive to work and switch hands holding the steering wheel so the other hand can relax and the weird gravelly, needles-and-pins feeling will subside a bit. I know I aggravate it at work, and at home, chopping and peeling and whatever else I might be doing in the kitchen. But at the same time, I usually find that at work, for instance, I’ll start out with pain and those odd feelings in my hands and as the day goes on things start to feel better. Or bother me less. It’s a weird thing.

And, of course, the cause is not solely kitchen-related. All sorts of things bother my hands. All things I love to do – things fabric related, wire and bead related, yarn related, sometimes typing, too.

There are days a meltdown really appeals to me.

But there’s a stubborn streak in me, and so I just do the things I want to do anyway. Maybe I don’t work on projects as long as I’d like to. Or I alternate between one task an another. I adjust.

Anyway, this morning, my hands were both rather unpleasant, worsening as I attempted to sort out my crochet stitches, and I was getting frustrated, stopping and starting, unraveling, letting my hands rest flat on the couch at my sides while I glared at the laptop screen.

I finally found a video tutorial that helped, though. Maybe it was filmed at just the right angle, or maybe the woman’s voice was particularly soothing and encouraging – I don’t know, but whatever it was, something clicked and I suddenly understood how to do what I needed to be doing. Yay!

The only issue left was how to hold the tension in the yarn. You typically do that with your left hand (if you’re crocheting right-handed), looping the yarn through a couple fingers, leading it off from your index finger as you grab it with the crochet hook and pull it through existing stitches.

I couldn’t keep the yarn looped properly over a finger. I couldn’t keep tension in it, couldn’t keep the yarn on my hand even. And it didn’t help that the more I tried, the tighter my hands got, and the tension made them ache and feel all gravelly and needles-and-pins.

It was stop and start for a good hour or so, and I could feel myself just getting SO FRUSTRATED, and part of me wanted to cry, and part of me just wanted to throw the crochet hook at the poised and elegant hands of the woman in the video tutorial, and part of me was wondering why the hell I felt I had to crochet anyway, since I’ve got plenty of other hand-aggravating hobbies to keep me busy.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!

That’s how I felt.

But the stubborn streak wouldn’t let me stop.

And bit by bit, it sort of got…easier. I still had to really focus on what I was doing, but I was getting the hang of it (except for the keeping the yarn where it was supposed to be on my left hand). And eventually, finally, I had this:

(I took this with my phone – the rectangular piece is on my lap. You can see two of my toes on the floor up there.)(Which makes it sound like they fell off my feet and rolled into the picture. They didn’t. But if they had, this would have been a very different post.)

Anyway, I clearly had screwed up in my counting in a bunch of the rows, which you can tell by the bumps and dents along both sides.

October 13, 2013

And that was last week’s madness, all those jars of sauce. I ended up with eleven quarts of spaghetti sauce with meat and eleven quarts of marinara.

And after that, I stopped. For a while. I felt exhausted from it all – the obsessive NEED to can every bit of produce in sight. So I did other things…like work, take care of my family, do laundry…

And then, once I’d had a bit of relative rest, the urge began to creep back…

I will blame the tomatillos.

(Side note: I took a break from typing just a few minutes ago to wash some of the bowls and pots in the sink from last night, and I was thinking – or wondering – just how much canning do I really NEED to do? How much food should I have “put up” for the winter, or the year, or whatever. And then I thought, well, I’ll keep going nuts through the end of this month…because then I’ll need to do all the cookie baking for Christmas anyway, and there’s only room for one kind of madness at a time…and all that was followed by the slightly kidding but not entirely thought: I can stop any time I want to. Um…okay.)

Anyway, back to blaming the tomatillos…

These are some of the purple ones. As you can see, they’re not all entirely purple, and in fact some are barely purple at all. I pick them when they release easily from the branch, though I know if I let them stay on longer, they’d grow more purpley. And some fall off. And some are taken before their time by overenthusiastic tomatillo-pickers who are both taller and shorter than I am.

So here they are.

We also had lots of green ones – still do – but I didn’t take a picture of them.

I’d frozen some of our earlier tomatillo harvests, but the freezers have become crowded so I decided I should make salsa now. There are still more tomatillos, both green and purple, out in the garden. I’ll deal with them later. This weekend, I’m canning what I’ve got.

So because we grew these purple tomatillos, I decided I’d make two separate salsas – the regular green one I’ve made before, and one with purple tomatillos and white tomatoes. I thought that one would be gorgeous.

So last night I prepped everything for the purple salsa:

So that’s five cups of purple tomatillos (chopped via the food processor), white vinegar and lemon juice, six cups of white tomatoes AND some of the palest green tomatillos to get me to that six cups, and then in the back bowl there are onions, jalapenos, cilantro, garlic, salt, coriander, and cumin.

Look at this pretty purple puree:

I’m not even a big fan of the color purple – I leave that to Julia – but in food? I love it. Purple cabbage, purple onions, purple tomatillos. So striking against the usual greens!

So I combined everything and cooked it for the requisite amount of time and ended up canning eight pints of this salsa.

Now, a while back in an earlier post featuring the purple tomatillo, someone asked in the comments section if the tomatillos would stay purple when cooked or would they turn gray.

I didn’t know, but now I do.

Sadly, the purple fades.

:(

They look just like the green tomatillo salsa. I think. I’m making that today, so maybe there will be a slight difference.

But still.

I had hoped.

Oh well. It tastes good, and that’s the important thing. Really it is.

And I can always make a fresh salsa with the next round of purple tomatillos, and we’ll just eat it that way. One of those things that can’t be preserved and must be appreciated and enjoyed in the moment.

So that was that.

I also canned 7 quarts of beef stock last night, and am right this very minute (7:00am on the nose) canning another 3 quarts – I didn’t have time last night.

In addition, I’ve got a double batch of baked beans slow cooking in the oven. My plan is to save some of them for part of tonight’s dinner, and – you guessed it! – can the rest. I’m particularly excited about that – this will be my first foray into canning solid food.

NO – wait, that’s not true! At some point during the summer I canned clams.

But still. Canned, homemade baked beans! I’m very excited.

My favorite part of making baked beans? Besides the eating, I mean…the foam!

I pretty much follow Bill’s mom’s recipe, or at least the basic procedure. After soaking the beans overnight, I drain them, put them in a pot, add fresh water and a little baking soda. I assumed the soda helped soften the beans, but I’ve read that it also helps eliminate the gas-producing qualities. In this house, I’ll take all the help I can get with THAT.

Anyway, I bring the beans/soda/water mixture to a boil and then cook them until the skins peel away from the beans when you blow on them. And I skim the foam off as it bubbles up.

But sometimes first I take pictures.

It’s like a science experiment!

And if I’m distracted – like I usually am – the water will boil and the foam will rise and spill right over the pot. Onto the stove. And then I have to clean it up.

I didn’t take a picture of that.

Once the beans were ready, I drained and rinsed them and set them aside while I cooked some of the trimmings from our most recent batch of bacon…

Bill had thoughtfully diced them before he froze them. Thanks, Bill!

Once they were browning a bit, I added some water, Dijon, salt and pepper, molasses, brown sugar, and a couple of peeled, halved onions.

And the beans. And a smidge more water.

Then I covered the pot, put it in the oven (250 degrees F), and I’ll take a look at them around noon or so. Maybe a bit earlier. I’ll also drop the temperature down a bit in another hour or so. I just want the pot to be nice and warm.

So now, to recap, I’ve got jars of beef stock in the canner, baked beans baking in the oven, and my next move is to put together the green tomatillo salsa and can that once the beef stock is finished.

And I’m going to be roasting two chickens later today. For dinner tonight and sandwiches and other concoctions through the week.

And the bones – of course – will be for more stock.

Because it’s still October, and I can still can.

But I can stop any time I want.

~~~

I was going to end this post there, but I can’t seem to stop ANYTHING right now, so I will go on typing.

I think part of my canning mania – or cannia – okay, Jayne, stop right there with THAT nonsense – comes from my increased familiarity and comfort level with the pressure canner. It’s rather scary, with all the heavy duty locking mechanisms and the loud sputtering noise it makes as the jars are processing…and what if I did something wrong, what if the jars explode inside the canner?

I’ve kind of passed that early stage of worry, and now it’s just about as no-big-deal to me as boiling water bath canning or cooking something or deep frying or whatever.

I’m comfortable. My pressure canner and I are friends now, not strangers trying to be polite despite a high level of distrust (on my part).

October 02, 2013

Yesterday I made two different great big batches of tomato salsa. Both were from the Ball Complete Book of Canning – my usual launching pad for canning projects. On the left, 23 pints and one half pint of Spicy Salsa (I quadrupled the recipe in the book because we liked this one last year), and to the right, 21 jars of what Ball calls Zesty Salsa and what we are calling Dragon Fire Salsa.

Actually, Bill referred to it as Dragon Fumes, I think, when he tasted it last night. But “fumes” just makes me think of putting gas in the car, and so I changed it.

All the salsa was canned using the hot water bath – or, more accurately – the boiling water bath method. I went three rounds with each salsa. Finally got in bed at 11:15. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing on my days off, but apparently THIS is what I do. Relax? Not so much. Maybe later today.

Right now I have a few moments to type because I’ve had the last 5 quarts of spaghetti sauce with meat, or meat sauce, or whatever you want to call it, in the pressure canner. The timer for that finally went off and now I’m waiting for the canner to depressurize so I can open it up and see if the jars survived their ordeal.

I’ll add them to the jars of meat sauce I canned the other day, and I’ll have eleven. Yay!

Pressure canning reminded me, today, of what it’s like to have a newborn, sort of. That sputtering noise the little weight gauge makes when the pressure’s correct…I find myself constantly listening, making sure it’s not sputtering too long or too often or, heaven forbid, not often enough. It’s like that new mother feeling when the baby is asleep IN THE OTHER ROOM. Is he breathing? Was that a cry? (Holding breath and listening to the monitor….) Yes, he’s breathing! (Great sigh of relief for one second until it starts over.)

Okay, it’s not EXACTLY like having a newborn. I wouldn’t pick up and hug my pressure canner. At least…not while it was still really really hot….

What else is going on here….

I do like ellipses……..……

Oh, yes, and in addition to the jars in the canner, I’ve got a great big vat of meatless tomato sauce bubbling on the stove. I’ll can that next – water bath version – and then I think I might be done for today. I was thinking of making and canning apple pie filling, mostly because I’ve never done it and we’ve got some great apples we picked the other day…but I think it’ll depend on how long the tomato sauce takes. I have a feeling there will be a lot of jars.

Oh! And this is a new one – I’m just about out of pint jars, 8 oz jars, and I’ve got ONE empty 4 oz jar left. I’ve got enough quart jars for today and beyond, but that’s IT. In fact, yesterday I had to buy two cases of pint jars so I’d have enough for all the salsa. Part of me wants to rush out and replenish the other sizes of jars, you know, JUST IN CASE THERE’S A CANNING EMERGENCY, but I am resisting.

Oh, and Julia’s home from school today. Not feeling well – sniffly and, well, she woke up with “rusty boogers.” If that isn’t cause to stay home, I don’t know what is.

Actually it’s been nice having her around. She helped me out by writing Spicy Salsa and Dragon Fire Salsa and the date on all those jars. And she’s pretty entertaining. Kept saying something about “now I’ll sign their heads!” as she wrote on all the salsa jars. That, or racing to the tissue box mid-sneeze. Yes, she washed her hands frequently. And didn’t sneeze ON the jars.

Right now she’s “taking a nap,” which seems to mean “singing and playing” in her room.

September 30, 2013

September 23, 2013

Bill and the kids went crabbing and fishing yesterday while I was at work and while the crabbing was a flop, the fishing was most definitely not. They came home with a whole mess (technical term – “whole mess”) of good-sized skipjacks. They’d only brought two poles, because at first Julia wasn’t interested, but once the fish started biting, she was in. And two poles was plenty, because at one point they were bringing a fish in with every cast.

Bill and Alex filleted all the fish, and then Bill skinned all the fillets. He also made a stock with spines and tails. We ended up with 2 lbs, 10 oz fish, which is pretty cool. We froze the 2 pounds in ziploc bags (1 lb ea) along with some of the stock.

I breaded and fried the remaining 10 ounces, which we had as part of our dinner.

Speaking of freezing things, I kind of went nuts for a few weeks, cooking in bulk and freezing future meals, or portions of meals. As a result of that insanity plus fishing, clamming, crabbing, and Bill’s eight thousand veggie burgers, our freezers are rather packed and we need to start eating some of the stuff before we freeze anything more.

Fortunately we don’t need to freeze winter squash.

We picked some squash yesterday, and we’ve still got a bunch outside to collect. Here’s a picture of what we brought in:

Had to stand on a chair to get this. Sorry about the picture quality.

Anyway, we’ve got a nice variety going on here, there are a couple of Long Island Cheese Pumpkins (the two big ones), sometimes called Cinderella pumpkins, one Galeux d’eysines (the warty one near the top of the basket), some butternuts (underneath, in the basket), some butternut-black futsu hybrids (there’s one in front of the two cheese pumpkins , and some that I don’t really know what they are but they could also possibly be some sort of hybrids (the pear shaped ones, like the two behind the cheese pumpkins and in front of the basket). We’ve got more outside, like I said, including some Musque de Provence, which are also shaped like the cheese pumpkins, but are currently green-and-turning-orange.

The smaller of the two cheese pumpkins in the picture above weighs thirteen pounds. I’m guessing the bigger one is maybe fifteen or so. And at least three of the Musque are in that weight range as well. So while we probably don’t have as many as last year, what we lack in quantity we’ll make up for in weight.

Very exciting.

And of course, I’m already thinking ahead to next year and what new variety I want to add to the mix.

September 18, 2013

I picked 3 purple tomatillos the other day. I feel like I’ve waited SO long for them to turn purple – I deserved to see how they looked on the inside, now that they’re properly purple (well, these three) on the outside.

And this is how they looked. Some purple, some green. I’m wondering if they’d become purpler on the inside as they age. I think they would, just because that one on the right, the most purplest of all, was more purple inside than the other two. But not by a lot, so who knows.

Anyway, since there were only three, and it was Taco Night (postponed from the previous night, which I’ll get to in a minute), I made a little bowl of fresh salsa using these, a bit of onion, a bit of jalapeno, and three White Tomasol (tomatoes). And some fresh cilantro. Everything but the onion came from the garden.

The jalapeno had this cute little curly thing sticking out of its skin. A curly jalapeno skin tag. Just thought I’d share.

We grew beans this year – two kinds – the kind you eat now, and the kind you let dry out so you can use the dried little beans to make soup or baked beans or something.

And sometimes they blend into one variety, like when you totally neglect your red noodle beans and they get way too big to enjoy – too fibrous – so you dry them out instead. Not sure if we’ll cook them or just save the seeds for next year.

The other beans in the picture below (besides the fading red noodles) were grown for drying. We’ve been picking them as they dry, and we’ve got a jar in the cupboard where we collect the dried beans. Eventually we hope to have enough for a single batch of…something.

The picture doesn’t do them justice. They’re huge. And a few minutes ago I moved them – this basket and the peacock tailfeather leaves – from that counter to another spot in the kitchen, and they were HEAVY.

Incident first – yesterday Julia was rollerblading and she fell (she was long overdue), and got herself a huge raspberry on her thigh. She cried, Bill managed to bandage it up with what we had (nothing that big), and she was eager to show it to me by the time I got home from work last night. It’s a bit stiff today, but it’s not deep at all, and there’s no gravel or anything embedded in it.

She’s fine.

~~~

Now, the story.

Friday night was supposed to be Taco Night. I made the salsa after work, and Julia and I went to the store to get a few more things while Bill went to watch the last part of Alex’s baseball practice. We’d probably eat around 7:30 or so, but that was okay, it was Friday and I was the only one who had to work in the morning.

Julia and I pulled into the driveway and I was surprised to see that Bill and Alex were already back. They’d just arrived a few minutes before us, and Bill had that somber look on his face that he gets when one of the kids has a scrape or cut or any sort of injury. Turns out Alex hurt his thumb. Well, no, first he got hit in the side of the knee, and that hurt, but some time after that, Alex was playing third and (shortish version) the kid running back to third (in a pickle between third and home) knew he wasn’t going to be safe anyway, so he didn’t slide. He ran straight into Alex. Alex had caught the ball thrown from home and had his glove hand up, ready to tag the other kid. The kid ran into his hand and bent Alex’s thumb waaaaaaaaay back. It must have hurt so much…

Alex put his glove back on and finished the inning.

He held back the tears til he and Bill were on their way home.

You know, because there’s no crying in baseball.

Anyway, I took a look and the whole thumb was pretty swollen. Bill kept looking at me with his funeral director face, and he’d hover there, asking “so what do you think?” every minute or two. Alex couldn’t bend his thumb at all, so – field trip! – off we went to the emergency room, to make sure it wasn’t broken.

Two hours later we were heading home. No break, according to the x-rays. Alex had a splint on and was told to ice it often and no baseball for a few days. And if it wasn’t better by Tuesday, we should see his regular doctor.

It’s funny, but Alex and I have a good time hanging out in the ER. We’ve been a couple of times over the past bunch of years. The other times were asthma issues. We talk. He’s nice to talk to. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just nice to know that we have a good little mother/son relationship.

And he told me he was glad I was there with him. I think he said something like “Moms are more caring…” – not that Bill isn’t caring. I think Alex meant nurturing. Or something along those lines. I try to be calm and relaxed and keep an “everything’s going to be all right” tone. Bill’s is more of an “Oh my GOD! That looks like it HURTS!” kind of caring. So it’s best I do the ER trips. Plus I like medical stuff.

Anyway, that’s that story. Alex is on the DL for a bit, and we’re going to see the Dr today because his thumb is still pretty swollen and while I have a feeling it’s still just a sprain, I figure it’s best to be sure.

But basically, he’s fine.

~~~

And now, the STORY.

** A word of caution: If you don’t like to hear about blood, skip this one. **

Okay. So you know how Bill’s been on a crabbing mission lately? He’s brought home I don’t know how many crabs now, and we cook them up, eat what we want and freeze the rest for some future meal. Well, a few weeks ago or so, he and Alex went crabbing/skipjack fishing at one of their spots. They were using both chicken legs and skipjack carcasses for crab bait, I think, and the technique was to tie the bait to a piece of rope, toss it out into the water and let it sit there til a hungry crab scuttled near and started feasting. Then they’d gently, gently, ever-so-gently pull the rope (and feasting crab) closer and at just the right moment, blindly (the water in this spot is kind of murky) scoop down into the water with the net and hopefully catch the crab.

Got all that? Good.

So this one day Bill and Alex went crabbing and fishing. I think they were fishing near a marina…off a dock. I think they came home with a little of both – 5-7 crabs and about the same number of skipjacks. Or I could be off on the number of fish. I don’t remember – sometimes it blurs together. That part isn’t important to the STORY anyway.

Anyway, during this whole adventure, Bill needed to jump into the shallow water, I think to go after a crab that had eluded his net. He doesn’t like it when they refuse to be caught.

The water, as I said, was pretty shallow there, but the mucky muddy sandy surface below was very soft and mushy, and when he jumped in, wearing his flip flops, his feet sank down deep. When he took a step, he lost his footwear.

That was unfortunate, but he also had to walk in the muck, which was littered with rocks and bits of shell and probably broken glass. He found a large rock he could stand on, and had Alex fetch his junky sneakers from the truck. He’d already felt some cuts to his feet and he didn’t want to risk any more. Somehow, balancing on the rock, he got his sneakers on, and crabbing continued.

When he got home, he showed me the catch, but, more importantly, he showed me the life-threatening injuries he’d sustained.

There was a nasty cut on one heel, and on the other foot, a cut right on top of his big toe. I told him to clean them both and put some Neosporin on. And I went back to whatever cooking I was doing at the time.

We were both busy for a while, he pulling things from the garden and putting together his crab boil seasonings, me…cooking something. I don’t remember. But we were both in the kitchen. And both walking around barefoot – the norm for me; rather unusual for Bill.

Anyway, he said he noticed the floor seemed wet, but figured it was water from the various food-related goings-on.

Until he looked down.

And saw the puddles – of blood.

Yes, blood. He gently brought it to my attention by shrieking.

His toe, which he’d slathered in antibiotic ointment, was…leaking. I figure the cut wasn’t able to scab over because of the ointment…so it had been spilling blood as Bill walked around the kitchen.

I looked down at his toe and yep, blood was pouring down on each side, kind of like a gentle volcano.

And then blood SPURTED out of his toe. Yes, SPURTED. Right out. In a graceful red arc.

And I shouted “Cool!” as my husband expressed more concern and shrieking. Okay, not shrieking. More like “Aaaah!” In a terrified tone of voice.

And my first impulse, as I watched the intermittent Monty Python sketch-like spurting of the blood from my beloved husband’s toe, was “I need to get my camera!”

Just for the record, I didn’t grab my camera, so there are no images of the event. (I also, all in the space of a nanosecond, realized I’d have to take a series of pictures in order to (hopefully) get a decent mid-spurt shot, and that such callous behavior might not do my marriage any favors.)

I did, however, spend minutes and minutes just now to create a life-like artistic rendering of the spurting. Julia was my technical critic and she gave the picture its title.

Now, lest you think I am completely heartless, I did tell Bill to sit down, I applied pressure, elevated the wound, cleaned it up and bandaged the toe. No amputation necessary. He looked nauseous at one point, so I urged him to look away.

I couldn’t help the fact that I kept laughing the whole time.

I tried to stop, really I did, but…well, I’d never seen anything like it before. Bill was the one who made the Monty Python reference. It just looked so…fake.

I think I was still giggling when we cleaned up the puddles.

Bill has recovered from his injuries and should finish up toe rehab in another week.

September 10, 2013

We grew green tomatillos last year, and this year we’ve also got a purple tomatillo plant! At first the fruit was green, which led to confusion and speculation that the seeds got mixed up or something, but we waited, and they started turning purple!

September 04, 2013

A couple of days ago Bill and the kids and Bill’s friend and one of his kids went crabbing. Gone are the days when crabs were the occasional bonus goodies brought home in addition to the major prey – the clams, the bluefish.

Now, we are The People Who Hunt the Savory Beautiful Dancers of the Sea. Well, of the Bay. And I haven’t even been hunting for them myself. (Because of course I am The Woman Who Tends the Hearth) (okay, enough with that silliness….)

August 20, 2013

After Softie passed away I firmly said I don’t want any more pets. Ever. I realize that’s a pretty normal emotional response after a pet dies. I’ve gone through it enough times, also, to know that the feeling subsides and pet people tend to stay pet people despite the periods of heartache.

Right now we’re focusing on bringing Scratchy’s weight down. It’s easier to regulate how much he eats when he’s the only one we have to feed. We only feed him twice a day now, and have learned to tell him no when he tries to beg for snacks. The kids encourage him to exercise with a flashlight – he chases the beam around the floor, and especially up and down stairs. So far he doesn’t suspect that this is for his own good.

He also has occasional weigh-ins on the Wii board. These are usually rather dangerous affairs for whichever kid (usually Alex) has to hold Scratchy, because while he’s very affectionate, he doesn’t like to be picked up.

Anyway, like all people trying to shed some pounds, he has had his ups and downs. We were pretty pleased when he lost a pound – only the kids wanted to reward him with a couple of cat treats, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of rationing his food…

Most recently he’s put some weight back on, so either someone’s been slipping him some extra kibble or the flashlight batteries have died and no one’s replaced them.

Scratchy has become a bit more sociable recently. Before, he would race out of the room and hide if anyone came to visit. Even family and friends who are here on a relatively regular basis would send him hissing and running up the stairs to hid under a bed. But we’ve noticed a change. He isn’t as quick to run away, and he doesn’t hiss so much. He even lets people – OTHER people – pet him.

I’m wondering if he misses his sister.

If, maybe, he needs some sort of interaction with other living creatures, and with Softie gone, he is gravitating toward these tall, non-feline beings that visit.

Or maybe she’d been telling him people were out to get him and he’s realizing that she was just messing with his head. Sisters do that.

Anyway, when he’s not begging for food or chasing balls of light, Scratchy does his best to cover all the chairs with white hair.

August 19, 2013

We’ve had family visiting from Seattle for the past several days, and on the first day we put together a clambake – a huge pot (about 7 gallons) filled with potatoes, chorizo, sausage, corn on the cob, steamers, little necks, and lobster.

August 12, 2013

My original laptop finally quit on me a while back, but I haven’t been able to do anything to replace it. So I told myself in a stern voice that once upon a time I didn’t even have a laptop, I used the desktop computer and that was just fine, and there was no reason I couldn’t do that again, so stop feeling sorry for your laptopless self right now, missy.

So I used the computer in our music/computer room and of course that worked fine.

Except.

Except for when the kids needed to practice. I’d be in the way. Or on the stool they needed to sit on. Or it was Alex practicing violin and it kind of hurt my ears to be so close to all that…………music.

So I started trying to figure out how to fix that.

(I know, I know, such a problem to complain about when there are so many other bigger issues in the world. But this is not a heavy website, it’s a light one. So my laptop issues are pretty much as heavy as things get.)

Anyway, it occurred to me that my mother bought a laptop years ago that she very, very, very, rarely (or never) used. Periodically she would call me or my sister for help getting it started again because it would sit dormant for so long it wouldn’t get updated and just ran sloooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwly at best. Plus it’s got a semron processor, which, I discovered, was the kind dinosaurs used on their laptops. Not the fast-paced dinosaurs, but the slow, lumbering kind.

I offered to buy the laptop from my mother, and she refused that, saying she’d like to give it to me and in return I could help her choose a new one when she decided to do that. So I said okay.

And I brought it home and plugged it in, and twenty five millennia later, I was able to get past the “Welcome” screen and attempt to explore things. I’ll fast forward through the agony and just say that for a birthday gift Bill asked his computer guy coworker to get all the stuff off my death-bed laptop and get this “new” one to run better/faster.

So here I am. And it’s even better than I expected, because Awesome Computer Guy added RAM and memory and cleaned it all up and tricked it into running faster with some sort of Computer Guy magic.

I am SO grateful.

And now I’m just getting used to having the laptop again. I got out of my writing habits (which, I know, were sometimes pretty sporadic), and for a while I didn’t even know where to set it up. But now I’m here in the living room, by the big front window, which is one of the two places I used to like to sit and type. The other place was downstairs on the same work table as my sewing machine, but since I rearranged everything down in the sewing area, that might not work out now.

Bill (the Hunter, the Great Provider, Farmer of the Bay and Gardener of the Back Yard) has been doing a bunch of crabbing lately. We’re eating our fill and then packing the remaining meat in crab stock and freezing it.

I’m looking forward to winter, when we’ll thaw one of those packages and make something yummy with locally caught crab meat…stuffed mushrooms, maybe. Stuffed flounder. Cheese and Crabmeat Fondue. Crab Rangoon. Who knows what else.

July 29, 2013

A couple of weeks ago Bill and I were horrified to discover that Julia’s hermit crab was dead. We found it’s curled, lifeless body outside the shell one day, and since this came so soon after Softie’s passing, well, we dreaded telling Julia. Although, she’s been angling for a guinea pig or hamster, so we also realized maybe she wouldn’t mourn this loss quite so much.

July 16, 2013

It was just me and Overly Serious Girl this morning. After running a quick errand and watering the window boxes and buckets (well, the plants growing in them), we adjourned to the air-conditioned basement/work space to accomplish something.

July 10, 2013

You’ve probably heard of this sort of thing – using old tee shirts to make something new, like shopping bags or quilts or, in my case recently, rugs. I’d say braided rugs, because that’s what they look like, but actually they’re kind of crocheted…sort of.

Anyway, I don’t have enough how-to pictures – woefully unprepared am I – but I taught myself to finger crochet and I made simple little bracelets for Julia and her friends out of the bottom seams of old tee shirts. I taught Julia how to do it, and she made seven bracelets in half an hour.

Anyway, using this same technique of crochet without a hook, you can make long chains with strips of old tee shirts (nice to use because they’re stretchy) or other strips of fabric…denim…yarn, whatever.

So I’d salvaged and sliced up a lot of old tee shirts from this household, and I decided to make little rugs for the kids’ rooms. More summery than the shag rugs they’ve got now.

I made two lonnnnnnng chains, one with Julia colors and one with Alex colors, and yesterday I started binding Julia’s rug. Now, if I was REALLY crocheting, I suppose I could crochet the whole thing together using some sort of round and round stitching. But that’s not happening. So I just started spiraling the chain and stitching it together on the back side. Here’s a picture I took not long after I started:

Very exciting, except you can probably tell the “rug” is curving more like a hat or a really large soft bowl. At first I thought I could stretch it out and it would lie flat…but as I kept going (past the above point) the cupping just became more pronounced. So I looked up stuff online about this sort of issue with braided/crocheted rugs, and learned I was stitching it all too tightly.

And after a lot of heavy sighing and frowning, I ripped out all my stitches and started again, this time with a looser stitch and paying careful attention to potential buckling.

Here’s where I was at the end of my day yesterday:

I’d gotten about as far as that white section before, and it was definitely NOT flat. This is much better.

It’s currently 17.5” in diameter, and I’ve got a bunch more left of the chain to go. Not sure how big this will get, but it really doesn’t matter. Julia already likes it.

I like it because I know where all those different portions of fabric came from. That little dark pink section near the top of the picture? A very small pair of stretchy pants Julia had…dark pink with black polka dots and black lace at the ankles. The section that looks white? Actually it’s also got tiny pale rosebuds, and it came from maternity summer pajamas I had when I was nursing.

One more – see the section that’s a blend of deal and dark purple? More very worn stretchy pants I couldn’t completely part with:

That’s about it for now, but I just wanted to share what I’ve been up to. There are other things, too, but they’ll have to wait.

July 01, 2013

She passed away Tuesday night, in our living room/basement. The kids were asleep. I think Alex suspected, though.

I sat with her. First I held her, but when that seemed too uncomfortable for her, I laid her down on the carpet and stayed down there with her.

She rested her head in my left hand, while I petted her non-stop with my right hand.

And all the while I looked into those eyes of hers.

I told her over and over that I was sorry, so sorry, and that it was okay…I’m here…I love you….

She looked at me but sometimes it was as if she was looking through me, and that is the image, one of them, that has stayed with me, haunting me, squeezing my heart inside my chest and forcing new tears to my eyes.

Sometimes it seemed to me she looked at me with reproach. Why couldn’t I do more for her? Why wasn’t I saving her? That’s what I’m supposed to do.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. So sorry.

Bill and I were both sitting with her when she exhaled for the last time. Scratchy was nearby. He knew something was wrong.

I wrapped Softie in one of Julia’s old baby blankets. It has tiny rose buds along the binding and I’ve always liked it. Then I put Softie in a plastic box – no lid – and tucked the ends of the blanket around her. She’d have looked like she was sleeping, only we couldn’t figure out how to close her eyes. So…she was resting. Bill put the box in the downstairs fridge.

~~~

Two days later Bill and the kids dug a hole near the garage. There’s a really pretty blue hydrangea growing there, so we thought it was the perfect spot.

When I got home from work, they showed me the hole (very deep – the kids stood in it to show just how deep), and I brought Softie up from the refrigerator, and we held her funeral.

The kids – no, all of us – picked flowers from everywhere in the yard and placed them in the cinder block that Bill had placed on top of the dirt so no animals would try to dig her up.

We cried.

Julia played her recorder.

We cried some more.

And then we went inside. Alex changed into his baseball uniform, and we headed to his game.

Life goes on, of course.

But frequently, still, I see her eyes from that final night, and something squeezes my heart. Hard.

May 16, 2013

When I recently fell back in love with quilting (not that I ever fell out of it…but we had kind of a parting of the ways and now we realize we are meant to be together forever), I figured there must be a gazillion quilting blogs out there, and I was curious to see what people were doing. So I think I typed in a search like “quilting blogs” or something, and landed on this page.

If you scroll down, there is a HUGE list of quilting blogs. I’ve been clicking on one or two of them whenever I get some time to explore. Some are defunct (the list went up in 2010), some have moved, but a lot of them are still there and it’s fun – and inspiring – to look at all the quilts people have made.

May 14, 2013

So the other day at dinner Julia said, out of the blue, “I don’t like eating raisins because it’s like eating tiny old people.”

I have no explanation.

~~~

The baby quilt I’ve been working on has conjured up memories of other baby quilts I’ve made, especially one of the first ones. Not sure if I’ve told this story before, but here goes…

This was back when ALLLLLL my quilting was hand-sewn. Piecing AND quilting. Everything. I loved it. And I still do, though too much of it bothers my hands. But this was a while ago.

Anyway, one of my sister’s friends, Betsy, was having a baby – I believe she was the first of their group to do so, and I was invited to the baby shower, and so I decided to make a quilt. I kind of blended aspects of the styles of Monet and Seurat, with colors from Monet’s Water Lilies. So I used soft greens and pinks and blues, and all the pieces were hexagons. I can’t describe it better, and I don’t have pictures, but I remember loving the creation of it…the artists, their styles, the colors…and yay – a baby!

Anyway, because I was a card-carrying member of Procrastinators Anonymous (still am, but not as bad), soon it was the night before the shower and I still hadn’t finished the quilt.

But I DO finish things. And the shower was at something like eleven o’clock the following morning (a Saturday, I assume), so, hey, I’d just stay up kind of late and get it done.

I was up all night. All. Night. I had the tv on, I was in the living room with my quilt on a table, and I was stitching my fingers off.

And yes, dammit, I finished that quilt.

I don’t remember if I took any sort of nap that morning, before the shower. I kind of don’t think I did.

Anyway, to make it even better, I had to drive, because my mom, who was also invited, had had surgery on the bottom of her foot and it was still in a cast or boot or something.

The shower was half an hour or so from where we were both living (and my sister wasn’t even able to come to the shower for some reason…she was living up in Boston at the time, so maybe it was because of work or something?) (and, as yet another side note, I now live just minutes from the church basement where that baby shower took place) …where was I? Oh yeah, half hour drive. So here we go, my limping mother and me with most of my brain wrapped in fuzz.

We put our gifts with the others and found seats sort of near the back. I propped my eyes open with paper clips. And the shower was under way.

While other gifts are being opened in the story, I’ll take a moment to explain the weirdness going on in my head during the shower.

I was big.

I felt, as I willed myself to remain upright on that folding chair in that church basement, with all the many sweet church member ladies and family members and friends, like I was twice the size – at least – of my usual self. Not fat. Big. A giant. That’s how sleep deprivation was distorting my world. I tried not to move so I wouldn’t frighten anyone with my big-ness.

And eventually Betsy got to the baby quilt. She pulled it from the bag (or unwrapped it – I don’t remember) and held it up for all to see, (as I tried to shrink down so I was normal-sized) and said, loudly, “JAYNE W MADE THIS!”

And the word loudly doesn’t do it justice. Her voice THUNDERED the words, and as she said them I seemed to grow bigger and all the little old ladies and moms and cousins and friends turned, as one, to look at me as I was contorting into something that might pass for normal-sized in my metal folding chair.

I hope I smiled politely.

No one ran away screaming, so I guess I looked harmless.

And the shower proceeded normally, with the rest of the gifts opened, lots of oohs and aaahs and smiles at all the adorable baby things…lots of thank-yous from Betsy, and then, of course, food.

That is my best baby quilt story.

I made baby quilts for my sister’s two kids, both of which were late. Not sure how late my nephew’s quilt was, but my niece didn’t get hers til she turned two. Hey, there were a lot of appliquéd flowers on that one. That sort of detail takes TIME.

Anyway, so that’s the baby quilt stuff.

~~~

Like I said in my previous post, all this quilting has resulted in a resurgence of my love of designing and sewing. So naturally I had to rearrange my sewing/jewelry-making/other stuff-making area. (For some reason I can’t stand the term “crafting” or anything “craft-“ related. I can’t use it. Ick.)

So that’s what I did yesterday. I’m still not completely done, but that’s today’s job.

Both pictures were taken in bad light and with my phone, so please excuse the poor image quality….

Before:

After:

The biggest change I wanted to make was to have that tall work table sticking out from the wall so that I could walk around it and work on big projects. It’s a bit of a tight fit back there, but I made it work and I’m SO happy about it. There are still areas that need to be tidied up or reorganized, but that’s the easy part.

The hardest part was moving the rolltop desk. Now, it does come apart, so that helps, and I remove all the drawers, of course, but still – it’s heavy, even broken down into sections. But I did it. I’ve done it so many times over the years, I’m actually pretty good at reassembling it, which is tricky because the center writing part has to slide in between the two drawer portions, so those things have to be just the right distance apart, and that middle writing section is HEA-VY because it’s got a huge piece of some sort of stone inlay as the writing surface. And, of course, there’s maneuvering the whole roll-top section – which is one enormous unwieldy piece – and fitting it onto the pegs that hold it in place (the pegs jut up from the corners of the two main drawer-holding parts of the desk). Anyway, putting that together successfully is always cause for high-fiving oneself. Not that I did, of course, because that would be weird.

And that’s about all the writing I have time for. I’ve got some laundry to hang outside, and some reorganizing to finish downstairs.

May 08, 2013

I worked on the baby quilt a bunch yesterday, made some cookies, got dinner ready, went with the kids to the book fair at their school, and did some more quilting before I went to bed.

I haven’t hand quilted in a while – my stitches are a clear illustration of that. Don’t have pictures to show you, but I will at some point.

It took me a while to get going, trying to find a way that felt comfortable now, because my fingers start feeling needles-and-pins-y when I’m doing all sorts of hand work – peeling, chopping, sewing, pinning, writing, tying shoes, braiding my hair – stuff like that. Sometimes it goes away after a while. I think my little hand muscles loosen up or something. I don’t know how it works. But I know I can compensate, or change the way I’m holding something or doing something, and it’s manageable.

Anyway, I fiddled around a bit and finally got into a good rhythm with the sewing. And it was so great to be doing that again. Like harvesting coriander seed, it’s meditative. Rhythmic.

It makes me happy.

And speaking of things that make me happy, here are the couple of pictures promised by the post title:

Julia, of course, mid-cartwheel. We were at the ball field the other day. Alex’s game was over and the coaches were talking to the team in the dugout. Julia and I were waiting, and Julia, who does not do “patiently” or “sitting still” all that well, was turning endless cartwheels and practicing round-offs. The sun was going down, and I was catching some great shadows of her against the back of the dugout wall. No shadow of her in this picture, but it was the best of the cartwheel shots (taken on my phone), so I thought I’d share.

And this…

This is Alex running through his music before the elementary school band and orchestra concert last week. The five local elementary schools come together for this concert – so five different groups of 4th grade violin, five groups of 5th grade violin, and 5 groups of band kids, all playing together. It’s pretty remarkable, and I love their music teacher.

You’ll notice that Alex isn’t playing his violin in that picture (though he is in the violin group and played that instrument as well). He does fine on violin. But he doesn’t love it. He plays it because, as Bill has pointed out, it gives him an in, an opportunity to play his guitar. So Alex was one of the kids who had a solo that night. The others were all from the band. Bill had arranged the second of movement of a Vivaldi concerto for Alex to play on guitar, and Alex’s violin teacher played the orchestra part on keyboard.

We went early so Alex and his teacher could run through the piece. That’s when I took the above picture. I like it – Alex with all the music stands and empty chairs behind him.

I only took one picture during the performance – first of all my hands had broken out in a cold sweat just before it was Alex’s turn to play, and because I didn’t want the click of the camera to be a distraction. And it also occurred to me that I should just sit there and listen, and delight in the moment.

May 07, 2013

I think I will be baking some cookies today. Nothing new – I’m making these, I think, since I have a lot of limes and a bag of shredded coconut. Not sure if there will be nuts in them or not.

I was at Alex’s baseball game last night, sitting on the bleachers, when Julia came running up to tell me someone was here to see me. (Julia spends Alex’s games playing with whichever younger sisters of other baseball players are around. There’s a good supply of them. Most are girls she knows either from school or from the season last year, and when she spots them and they see her, it’s like a tenth year reunion of best friends who haven’t seen each other since graduation. Very cute.)

Anyway, the someone was the mom of one of Julia’s former classmates. Her son is playing baseball, too, and he had a practice that night.

She asked me how my writing was going, and for a minute I had no idea what she meant.

Oh, yeah, this blog. Um, I haven’t been doing much writing over the past year.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, on and off. I even thought, recently, that maybe this website had run its course. Maybe I should just say thank you and goodnight.

But…nah.

Still, I keep finding that I just don’t feel like writing about food. I think, maybe, that I don’t need to write about food like I used to, because cooking is now “what I do for a living.” I just don’t feel like photographing what I make for dinner and talking all about it. Unless it’s something very different or really interesting. I don’t know. It’s weird, but that fire has burned out.

And I came to the conclusion (yesterday, after mulling things over), that that’s fine. I’m not required to write about food. I can write about whatever I want to. Or not.

I see my stats dip way down when it’s not pre-Easter (when those posts about coloring eggs are all over the place), and at first I felt this panic – Oh no! I have to get those numbers up! – but…why? I am not dependent on the ad revenue. It’s nice, but not crucial. So…I can relax about that.

I have today off. My days off are so precious to me. At first I’d use days off to catch up on all the household things – do tons of laundry, dishes, shopping, cooking, baking, etc. But now, I don’t want to use up my time – MY time – doing all that. So I try to get as much of that stuff done on work days, or have the kids do some of it, so that I can spend my days off doing what I WANT to do do.

Lately it’s been all about the fabric. I’m working on a quilt but I can’t show you because it’s a baby quilt and a gift and no one gets to see it (out there in internet land) until after the baby arrives. Which should be soon. SO excited!!

I love fabric. I love designing quilts or little wall hangings or pillows… and I haven’t really done a lot of that in a LONG time. But now, I think now that I’m cooking for a living, it’s like THAT hobby or passion or whatever it is has been sated, and now I have room for other creative pursuits.

And isn’t that a great thing?

I still need to get back to repairing other quilts we have – a project I started a while back and then dropped. But it can wait til after this baby quilt. And it’s Spring – we don’t need as many quilts.

I’ve also been sucked into the black hole of Pinterest, and that’s actually been a great motivator for me. I see all these amazing creative projects (including quilts), and I just want to make them all. Or not – but make my own things. Because why not?

So that’s what I’m working on today. Hoping to finish the baby quilt. And then a couple other little projects…and then….?